[Xapian-discuss] Versions of languages to support in Xapian 1.4.x

[Dan Colish]

> GCC
> ===
> 
> Xapian 1.0 required at least GCC 2.95.3 (but not GCC 2.96).
> 
> Xapian 1.2 has a hard minimum requirement of GCC 3.1 (which allowed us
> to remove a few workarounds for older versions), but we recommend using
> at least 4.1.
> 
> Xapian 1.3.x currently has 3.1 as a hard minimum, but recommends at
> least 4.3.
> 
> Aside from it not being so easy to test with anything before GCC 4.3,
> there don't seem to be very compelling reasons to pick a particular hard
> minimum. Requiring C++11 support might be nice, but I think that's too
> aggressive a target currently. So I'm tempted to leave this as it is.

I'm wondering how we can really set a minimum requirement that we cannot test with. I know that OSX 10.6 still uses 4.2 so that might be one spot to cut off at. IMHO, < 4 might only be useful for OpenBSD which does have a port. They might be able to conduct some testing as well.
> 
> Other C++ compilers
> ===================
> 
> Recent clang seems to actually produce a working Xapian, but I'm not
> sure when it started worked (older versions produced code which
> seg-faulted when handling exceptions). I've not tried any other
> compilers very recently. Feedback welcome.
> 
It would be great if we could start building against clang, but I don't see it as a high priority. If buildbot could be configured to run a job that regularly tried to build with clang and the fixes were minor, that would be a good intro project for someone looking to get involved.
>