Proposals:Dropping Support for Visual Studio 6.0
From KitwarePublic
It has been suggested that ITK should drop support of the Visual Studio 6.0 compiler.
http://www.itk.org/pipermail/insight-users/2008-May/025838.html
Real world issues
Visual Studio 6 is the most recurrent compiler insight-developers have to cope with:
- http://www.itk.org/pipermail/insight-users/2006-February/016823.html
- http://lists.boost.org/boost-users/2007/12/32632.php
- http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2009-April/012094.html
- http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2009-April/012180.html
- http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2009-February/011850.html
Motivation
- Lack of support for template partial specialization
- The compiler is about 10 years old
- It is out the market (Microsoft doesn't sell it anymore)
User's Opinions
Please add your opinions here:
In Favor of Dropping Support
- Hans Johnson: My vote has stayed the same for many years now. I think that the need to support partial specialization is critical for future of ITK. Dropping support for VS6 will allow us to move the toolkit forward.
- Alex. Gouaillard
- Gert Wollny (I filed the bug report)
- Brian Gee Chacko
- Mathieu Malaterre: ITK community should focus on writing algorithm, and not on supporting broken compiler (VS7.1, VS 2005 & VS 2008 are even free of charge).
Against Dropping Support
- Bill Lorensen: Partial specialization can be implemented in Visual Studio 6; see itkImageTransformHelper.h
- Comment (Gert Wollny): No, the example shows function (template) overloading and not partial template specialization - compare e.g. D. Vandevoorde and N. M. Josuttis "C++ Templates" pp.179-204.
