[LLVMdev] [RFC] Raising minimum required Visual Studio version to 2013 for trunk

[Aaron Ballman]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 6:54 PM, Chris Bieneman <beanz at apple.com> wrote:
> I’d like to propose raising the minimum required compiler for the LLVM & Clang trunks for Visual Studio to MSVC 2013.
>
> Doing this will allow us to take advantage of a bunch of C++11 features that are not supported by MSVC 2012. According to MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh567368.aspx) the list is:
>
> * Non-static data member initializers
> * Variadic templates
> * Initializer lists
> * Default template arguments for function templates
> * Expression SFINAE
> * Alias templates
> * Delegating constructors
> * Explicit conversion operators
> * Raw string literals
> * Defaulted and deleted functions
>
> Questions, comments, concerns, general feedback?

We shifted the minimum MSVC version to 2012 in January of this year,
and have run into only a few issues where C++11 features exist in MSVC
2013 but not MSVC 2012. So I'm wondering what problem this solves in
practice for our code base?

Personally, I use MSVC 2013 instead of 2012. But I would hesitate to
switch to 2013 as the minimum supported version just yet. It's been
out for less than two years and until "14" drops, it is the newest
version of the compiler. When we made the switch, the goal was to
support only the last two versions of MSVC, and I don't see any strong
evidence to support expediting that schedule. I think this is a great
plan for when "14" is officially released.

~Aaron