On 02/07/2025 17:04, Christian Mazakas via Boost wrote:
On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 10:52 AM cppleo--- via Boost <boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
Legacy systems will continue work. If you ignore them, they ignore you. (How do you think what is chipper: halt a rolling mill or keep use legacy system with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, OS/2, Novell NetWare, etc?)
Removing C++03 compatability from many libraries and breaking Boost.ASIO in 1.87 seriously damaged the Boost reputation. If Boost break building via b2 (non-CMake), Boost will damage reputation again.
Also, I'd like to see some citations for this. At least for Math and Multiprecision, I don't think think we have ever had a bug report submitted asking us to reinstate C++03 (or even C++11) support. On the other hand we pretty consistently get reports from folks using bleeding edge features and compilers, and (rightly) complaining when they don't work. It's actually surprising how much stuff has been broken by new C++ standards: it's mostly things getting marked as deprecated (float_denorm_style is the next one for us to sort out), but there were changes to the preprocessor for C++23 which have hit us too.
On a practical note, it's simply not feasible to support every possible language standard, and certainly not possible for a larger library to rigorously CI them all. Best, John.