Re: [Boost-users] Supporting Visual Studio 6 in boost

From: Doug Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-12-11 15:32:29

On Dec 11, 2007, at 4:51 AM, Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
>   This is not exactly a user question, but I was wondering if a couple
> of boost developers could comment on the support of VS6 in boost.
>   How much time consuming is it ?

At one point, it was extremely time-consuming for me, taking up about  
1/4 of the time I spent implementing Boost code. Things have gotten  
better recently, because I've been ignoring VC6 for new features and  
trying to avoid touching any code that is intended to work on VC6.

>   Are there plan to actually drop it at some point ?

We dropped VC6 support in the Graph library one or two releases ago.  
(Yay!)
I have no plans to drop support for it in other libraries, but I  
won't be supporting it in new libraries.

>   Were there cases where you had to provide a duplicate implementation
> (partial specialization, template template parameter, SFINAE...) with
> slight modifications, therefore making the boost code more difficult
> to maintain ?

Oh, sure. Some libraries have completely different implementations  
for VC6 (e.g., tuple), whereas others have been twisted horribly to  
deal with it (Graph).

>   How much did this compiler impact the design of boost API /  
> internals ?

That's two different questions with two very different answers. We've  
pretty strongly resisted any changes to the Boost API to accommodate  
broken compilers (of which there are many; VC6 is just the most  
popular broken compiler). But lots of developers have mangled the  
internals of their libraries to get around compiler (and language)  
limitations. In some cases, the latter is more problematic: anything  
using the Preprocessor library, for example, is completely and  
totally unreadable... but that's not the fault of any compiler.

        - Doug