> Something that has also worked well for me historically is aggressively updating tool chains as an integral part of the development process. ... I've adopted

> Something that has also worked well for me historically is aggressively updating tool chains as an integral part of the development process. ... I've adopted a policy that for every significant compiler or build system release, we create a branch that verifies a good build. If it doesn't build without warnings or errors, or fails in testing, that is treated the same as a bug in the code to be dealt with ASAP. ... This also makes it much easier to incrementally modernize and refactor the code base with new language features -- the tool chain supports the latest and greatest even if the code base doesn't yet. Good Point.