Re: Dropping C++03 support (again)

From: Andrey Semashev (andrey.semashev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-02-06 13:59:54

On 2/6/23 16:40, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:
> Boris Kolpackov wrote:
>>> Boost release 1.83.0 is announced to require C++11 at minimum. This
>>> means compilers that have all the
>>> C++11 standard headers, and support all the C++11
>>> syntactic constructs and keywords without issuing errors. (E.g. VS2013
>>> doesn't qualify because it doesn't support the `constexpr` or
>>> `noexcept` keywords.)
>>
>> IME, this is an unreliable criterion. For example, based on this MSVC 14.3
>> (VS2015) would be a fair game but in practice its constexpr support is so
>> buggy/incomplete that it's pretty much unusable.
> 
> On the contrary, it's a highly reliable criterion. It allows you to write
> "constexpr" instead of "BOOST_CONSTEXPR" without the compiler issuing
> an immediate error.

I think, the point is that while you can write "constexpr", the compiler
will likely fail to compile that code in most/all real world contexts.
The question is what do we, Boost maintainers, do when users come
complaining. I think, listing the minimum compiler versions we support
would be useful.

That said, many libraries already did list compiler versions before. And
we also had libraries that didn't support C++03, and we had some
libraries raise their minimum C++ version requirement during their
lifetime, so I'm really not sure what exactly this proposal is bringing.
I sure hope that it is not that libraries supporting C++03 are now
banned somehow.