C++11 on master (towards LO 4.5)

[Jan-Marek Glogowski]

Am 25.11.2014 um 09:13 schrieb Stephan Bergmann:
> Until now, our minimum C++ compiler requirements on master are:
> 
>   * Clang 3.1
>   * GCC 4.6 (specifically for Munich; preferred 4.7)
>   * MSVC 2012
> 
> Branch-off of LO 4.4 from master seems like a good time to re-visit. And
> natural candidates for consideration appear to be dropping MSVC 2012 for
> 2013, and/or the feasibility of dropping GCC 4.6 for 4.7.
> 
> What could that buy us in terms of newly available C++ features?  Based
> on the progress from MSVC 2012 to 2013, the following list shows which
> core language features became available where:
> 
> And additionally dropping GCC 4.6 for 4.7 would give us an additional
> three new features:
> 
> * Non-static data member initializers
> * Alias templates
> * Delegating constructors
> 
> Thoughts?

Munichs point of view hasn't changed. I'll expect us to be on Ubuntu
12.04 for at least the next 1 1/2+ years. And we're quite reluctant to
support our own build tool chain. So as long as the gcc 4.7+ features
aren't needed, we would like to stay on gcc 4.6.

As another datapoint, Firefox 31esr still builds on 12.04, but it's the
first ESR, which doesn't build on 10.04 using gcc 4.4. I hope FF 38esr
will still be compilable on 12.04.

As we'll just begin switching to LO 4.1.6+ next month, I'm planning to
do our next LO release based on 4.5 at the end of next year; it might
even be in the support timeline of LO.

Jan-Marek