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

[Chandler Carruth]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Aaron Ballman <aaron at aaronballman.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 7:35 PM, Chris Bieneman <beanz at apple.com> wrote:
> > This thread hasn’t had too much traffic, but it sounds like many people
> are
> > in favor and there is no strong opposition. If I understand Aaron’s only
> > objection was based on preserving existing policy rather than a technical
> > reason.
> >
> > Anyone want to make the official call?
>
> I am still opposed.
>
> We told the community less than nine months ago (when we made the
> C++11 switch) that we would support the last two versions of MSVC. Now
> we're saying "only the latest version, because it has nice things."
> That would make sense if those nice things were something we couldn't
> live without, or if there was a long delay for a new release of MSVC.
> Neither of those things seem to be the case, so I'm not certain why we
> would change our developer policy on three day's notice.


So:

1) When we had the discussion 9 months ago I specifically called out that
MSVC might be reasonable rev faster than other compilers due to the rapidly
improving feature set. I think that this thread is essentially exploring
the possibility of actually doing that.

2) I actually think the features listed are *very* valuable. If we can move
faster, I think we should. But there is an "if we can" in there.

3) I completely agree about the 3-days thing. This is a good start, and
none have really shouted in objection. That's a good sign, but I would wait
at least until next week so that we have an LLVM weekly post, and digests
etc go out so that you reach an even larger audience. You should also email
cfe-dev and lldb-dev because those projects are very impacted by this
change.

If next week, no one has raised an objection of the form "this would break
my usage of LLVM" or "I can't easily upgrade for N months", then I think we
should move forward. At that point I think you should commit something to
the CMake build which errors on old versions of MSVC *without* updating
documentation, policy or code. You'll probably have tto revert it and get
some bots updated. Once the build bot fallout is fixed, and that commit
stays in tree for roughly a week without shouting, I think we can update
the documentation.

-Chandler
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