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Been there, done that. Several jobs ago. At a hedge fund, corporate mandated OS at the time was RHEL5. C++11 had been finalized for about 3 years at this point,

Been there, done that. Several jobs ago. At a hedge fund, corporate mandated OS at the time was RHEL5. C++11 had been finalized for about 3 years at this point, latest GCC at the time had nearly full support (only glaring gap I remember at the time was regex was "there" but it was a stubbed-out interface, it didn't actually work). We'd even had lecturers in the office of the likes of Scott Meyers & Herb Sutter on C++11, but could we use it? Hell, no. Shit, some of us had even been interviewed by Scott Meyers for his Effective Modern C++ book. Still couldn't officially use C++11, so, given the frustration, we went rogue. It was a pain, but I built the latest stable GCC from scratch and all of the libs we needed against it (boost, unixodbc, mqseries, intel tbb, tibrv). It took a while (I think GCC took like 4 hours to build at the time, even with a parallelized build), but once set up, it was liberating.

magduf 9y ago
It sure seems to me that "enterprise" Linux distros not supporting modern languages/compilers (e.g., Python 2.7 in RHEL6) only hurts Linux adoption overall and its reputation.
- hermitdev 9y ago
  To a degree. But, on the same token, large enterprises, especially financial, typically value stability and are risk averse when it comes to core infrastructure. So, yeah, you don't always get the latest shiny things.
- bluGill 9y ago
  Old is the keyword you are missing there. Linux distributions, even enterprise ones have great C++11 support. However RHEL is designed for those who are thinking "I got this working now lets not break it". There is no reason to want C++11 on RHEL5 - the only valid reason to do anything on that system is if you already have a working server and need to do a bug fix. If you want to write new features you should be targeting the latest RHEL where you do have all of that.
- gnufx 9y ago
  ? $ repoquery python27 rh-python36-python python27-0:1.1-25.el6.x86_64 rh-python36-python-0:3.6.3-1.el6.x86_64
jcelerier 9y ago
> (I think GCC took like 4 hours to build at the time, even with a parallelized build) were you running on potato computers ? I clearly remember building GCC 5.0 from source a few years ago and don't remember it taking more than 15-20 minutes on a i7 2600. (Of course you have to disable the whole unnecessary bootstrap stuff and only build c & c++ support).

magduf 9y ago

It sure seems to me that "enterprise" Linux distros not supporting modern languages/compilers (e.g., Python 2.7 in RHEL6) only hurts Linux adoption overall and its reputation.

hermitdev 9y ago
To a degree. But, on the same token, large enterprises, especially financial, typically value stability and are risk averse when it comes to core infrastructure. So, yeah, you don't always get the latest shiny things.
bluGill 9y ago
Old is the keyword you are missing there. Linux distributions, even enterprise ones have great C++11 support. However RHEL is designed for those who are thinking "I got this working now lets not break it". There is no reason to want C++11 on RHEL5 - the only valid reason to do anything on that system is if you already have a working server and need to do a bug fix. If you want to write new features you should be targeting the latest RHEL where you do have all of that.
gnufx 9y ago
? $ repoquery python27 rh-python36-python python27-0:1.1-25.el6.x86_64 rh-python36-python-0:3.6.3-1.el6.x86_64

jcelerier 9y ago

> (I think GCC took like 4 hours to build at the time, even with a parallelized build) were you running on potato computers ? I clearly remember building GCC 5.0 from source a few years ago and don't remember it taking more than 15-20 minutes on a i7 2600. (Of course you have to disable the whole unnecessary bootstrap stuff and only build c & c++ support).