Re: [ros-dev] Status Meeting (November 2020)

I unfortunately don't get to contribute much anymore due to other commitments, so my
view has little weight here, however I just wanted to throw my support behind Colin here
in his effort to move the project forward.

Personally, I'd love to see reactos move to more modern standards, allowing more
emphasis to be placed onto modern C++ and the benefits it brings:
- Support for scoped resources and RAII
- Better type checking
- Stronger use of const correctness
- Range based loops
- Use of bool and nullptr instead of BOOLEAN/BOOL and NULL
- Even use of the thing I hate the most ... auto 😊
- STL in user mode
- vectors, lists, etc
- NATVIS support to make the above easy to debug
- etc, etc, etc

I'm not advocating that these should be requirements, or to ever try to push devs to
make use of them, but it would be incredibly useful to give developers the option if they
prefer, as so many developers no do.

If it were me, I'd be tempted to drop VS2015 support too, only ever supporting the
last two major toolchains from any compiler.

Ged.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ros-dev <ros-dev-bounces(a)reactos.org> On Behalf Of Colin Finck
Sent: 02 December 2020 08:07
To: ros-dev(a)reactos.org
Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Status Meeting (November 2020)

>   1. Visual Studio 2010 is the last version that works
> (or almost works) 
>  on ReactOS [...]
>  2. Dropping useful features is not really a good idea at all. 
Oleg, nobody wants to take away any features here. VS2010 will continue 
to run on ReactOS now and in the future. This discussion is merely about 
*compiling ReactOS* with VS2010.

Everyone, please put personal preferences aside and think about the big 
picture:
We don't have the workforce Microsoft had when creating Windows XP.
The only way we can ever create a compatible OS is by leveraging modern 
technologies not yet available back then and building on the open-source 
work third parties have already done for us.
If we however decide to limit us to 10-year-old technologies now, we can 
do neither. Don't expect us to ever get this project into a usable state 
in a lifetime then.
The future of the project is at stake here!

I don't want to repeat myself, so let me just link to the reasoning I 
already gave:
* https://reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/2020-December/019158.html
* https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/2658#issuecomment-619540076
* https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/2658#issuecomment-629498043
* https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/2658#discussion_r427615924
* https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/2658#issuecomment-631113317


Best regards,

Colin Finck