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Re: A case for C++11 in Octave


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: A case for C++11 in Octave
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 14:07:05 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Icedove/24.5.0

I recently tried to build Octave with the "native" compiler on one of these old but widely used systems. I think it was SuSE 10.4, but the results probably would have been the same on RHEL 5.8 (or equivalently, CentOS). I was pleasantly surprised that there were no problems building Octave but when I tried to build packages I encountered failure for the image package because it uses some c++11 features in one file, union-find.h++. I'm not sure of the reasons why c++11 features are really needed in that file, but it is annoying to find that building with the native compiler won't work.

Consider that I found this annoying, and I'm quite experienced building Octave, GCC, and many other tools. My experience is that when most people hit failures like this, they just give up and curse the whole experience. It does NOT encourage them to upgrade their compiler or OS.

Further, if you rely on the latest features of the latest versions of the tools you use, you are also likely to make things more difficult on yourself. What happens when those latest features have critical bugs but you can't build with older versions of the tools?

I'd really prefer to be conservative about what new compiler features we require to build Octave.

jwe




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