[ros-dev] Status Meeting (November 2020)

[Joachim Henze]

I totally and vehemently agree with Hermes here: We should NOT ditch VS2010.

Arguments that were raised by others against VS2010 and my reply:
-"ditching it brings in new developers to ros magically" <- I do ask then,
where are they? I don't see any.
-"we should not be limited to strict C89" <- No one did request for that. All
we want is to remain compatible to VS2010. A subset.
-"syncing BTRFS is a bit harder" <- So what? Then let others do the job.
Actually BTRFS is not even a mandatory feature of ros. Having it in the tree is just
luxury.
-"libc++" <- I see no urgent need and nothing it would give in return that
would outweight what we would sacrifice.

My arguments again for keeping VS2010:
-VS2010 creates the smallest binaries of all compilers we do support
-VS2010 CAN be installed in ros, when ros is installed as Server during 2nd stage, (yes
this was not the case for a very short moment, unfortunately exactly when we discussed in
https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/2658 but now it works again, even in 0.4.14-RC51)
-VS2010 can now even open the VS2010 cmd prompt see
https://jira.reactos.org/secure/attachment/57140/57140_0.4.15-dev-203-g711f…
-no other VS>2010 can even complete its setup in ros, and that will remain like that
for many years to come
-VS2010 is the last version that runs on XPSP3 (which is important for some of our devs
including myself)
-VS2010 is the last version that runs on 2k3SP2 which is our current target
-VS2010 is reliable with industry-proven stability, and itself no moving target (unlike
VS2019 which breaks our builds every few weeks when MS upgrades it)
-VS2010 DOES provide std::unique_ptr. Stating anything else is just a lie. It covers >
95% of CPP2011-standard. It is absolutely possible and not complicated to write
leak-free-code with it.