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

[Colin Finck]

Am 25.11.2020 um 22:26 schrieb Hermès BÉLUSCA-MAÏTO:
>   What about that discussion about why we have ditched
> out MSVC 2010 support 
You mean reintroducing an ancient compiler that forces us to hack around 
its incapacity to deal with anything more modern than C89? One that 
already makes it harder to import third-party components and attract new 
developers?

Let's face it, we already make our incredible job of writing a 
Windows-compatible operating system even harder than Microsoft's - by 
supporting both GCC and MSVC. We spend enormous amounts of time to just 
get the basics right for both toolchains, and still fail at things like 
the C++ standard library. Ditching MSVC 2010 finally paves the way for 
importing a modern and trusted third-party C++ library like Clang's 
libc++ to replace our hacked and unmaintained stlport. Going even 
further, we could finally draw from the huge pool of talented C++ 
developers, who leverage the benefits of C++11 and beyond. Think about 
that next time you debug a memory leak or a deadlock that would have 
been impossible through std::unique_ptr or std::mutex.

This project won't ever become usable in a lifetime if we don't go with 
the time but stick to old habits forever. There is no inherent value in 
supporting old compilers, just wasted developer time.
And don't tell me about self-hosting: It's not like anybody productively 
uses ReactOS for building ReactOS right now. If you just want to 
demonstrate that, use the RosBE GCC-based toolchain. I already spent 
hours on backporting that back to ReactOS/Windows XP...


Now I usually would have put that on the agenda for the meeting and 
asked for a vote.
But as this year's ditching of MSVC 2010 is just the implementation of a 
meeting decision from 2 years ago 
(https://reactos.org/project-news/december-2018-meeting-minutes/), 
meeting votes are apparently not considered binding here. Neither is 
apparently the discussion we had in the related PR 
https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/2658.


So let's have an open discussion and voting process right here on the 
mailing list for everyone to see, to decide this once and for all!
Just reply to this mail, tell about your reasons - and more importantly 
tell whether you support or reject dropping MSVC 2010 support.

Votes by CORE REACTOS MEMBERS are then counted on 1ST JANUARY 2021.


At this point, it should be obvious that I myself SUPPORT the decision 
to ditch building ReactOS with MSVC 2010.


Cheers,

Colin