[cfe-dev] [LLVMdev] RFC: A proposal to move toward using C++11 features in LLVM & Clang / bounding support for old host compilers

[Chandler Carruth]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 9:04 AM, <dag at cray.com> wrote:

> Renato Golin <renato.golin at linaro.org> writes:
>
> > In a nutshell, if we want the toolchain to evolve with time, we'll
> > need to have API changes, and we'll need to update surrounding
> > software to cope with that. The only difference is if we want to be
> > doing this as our day-to-day job, or twice a year (or even less than
> > that if you stay on a release for a while longer). I personally think
> > that it's more manageable to do that on releases than on trunk (been
> > there, done that, and it sucks).
>
> Except that the core developers recommend working off trunk.  If you
> want to contribute code back, you pretty much have to work off trunk.
>

The need to base your work off of trunk to contribute it back is an
inherent fact of life with a project that moves as fast as LLVM. No amount
of stable APIs would remove this pressure.

This does (naturally) come with a cost. Chasing API changes is easily the
most impactful thing we deal with here, and I suspect it is for others as
well. It still is less expensive (IMO) than doing one-off updates from
release X to release X+N. And it still dwarfs the cost of using a
reasonably modern toolchain.
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