[cfe-dev] Supporting building clang/llvm with VS2012. Why that one?

[Chandler Carruth]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 2:33 AM, G M <gmisocpp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Sorry if this is a silly question, please don't bite my head off, but:
>
> If I understand the situation correctly, clang/llvm aims to be buildable
> by VS2012.
>
> What's the rationale for this?
>
> VS2012 is a pretty recent build, perhaps too recent to represent an
> amazingly large number of users versus earlier versions of Visual Studio.
>
> Given that, why not aim to be compatible with VCExpress 2013 instead of
> VS2012 and track the latest of that as soon as it's released. A new version
> is coming soon I understand.
>
> I say this because it's free and both VS2012 and VCExpress can be
> installed side by side. So why not?
>

VisualStudio 2012 has been out for well over a year, whereas 2013 has been
out for only a few months. There was a reasonable amount of effort required
just to get everyone migrated from 2010 to 2012, I think it would be quite
hard to try to get everyone onto 2013. At the time I floated the suggestion
of 2012 as the minimum version, 2013 still miscompiled LLVM pretty badly
IIRC, but that was one of the early preview versions.

However, I'm perfectly happy for the actual Windows users of LLVM and Clang
to make this call. I personally think that given the challenges with the
C++11 support in older versions of VisualStudio in general, it makes sense
to be significantly more aggressive with the host toolchain version minimum
there. But we have to listen to the users on the platform. If there are
folks using VS2012 that would be unable to move to 2013, I think supporting
them is likely worth the cost at least for a while.
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