[PATCH] D56819: Document toolchain update policy

[JF Bastien via Phabricator via llvm-commits]

jfb marked 2 inline comments as done.
jfb added inline comments.


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Comment at: docs/GettingStarted.rst:234
 * GCC 4.8
 * Visual Studio 2015 (Update 3)
 
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serge-sans-paille wrote:
> Visual Studio is mentionned here, but not in the
> 
> > Generally, try to support LLVM and GCC versions from the last 3 years at a minimum
> 
> Sentence around line 651 in docs/DeveloperPolicy.rst. maybe we should harmonize that?
The prior discussions were mostly worried about 2 things:

 * Distros come with GCC preinstalled, and people want to avoid building a new GCC to build clang. The policy tries to reduce bootstrapping work when possible, and a proposal has to look at which versions of GCC we're phasing out from which distros.
 * Clang bootstrap is another worry: how many times would one need to compile clang?

In general, the feeling from the conversations was that updating MSVC hasn't been too much of an issue for people in the discussion. Further, while recent MSVC has amazing C++ support, older ones don't. That's why there's no guidance on MSVC. It doesn't mean "ignore MSVC", it just means there's no ballpark guidance *right now*, but a proposal to bump minimum MSVC versions should still consider what bumping MSVC means.

To be clear: "the policy doesn't say anything about X" doesn't mean we can ignore X.

A future revision of this policy could obviously have guidance for MSVC.


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https://reviews.llvm.org/D56819