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> You're talking about production software, many of which has decades worth of commit history, which you simply cannot spend time going through each and every s

> You're talking about production software, many of which has decades worth of commit history, which you simply cannot spend time going through each and every single line of code of your >1M LoC codebase. They can keep using the old standard.

motorest 1y ago
> They can keep using the old standard. But they cannot upgrade. Ever. At least without requiring major maintenance work. Which means never. Do you understand what that means?
- nickysielicki 1y ago
  Every compiler continues to support old standards. What risk am I missing? This feels like a perfectly acceptable outcome for icky legacy code that is not essential enough to maintain.
  - SideQuark 1y ago
    No they don't, not even close. Name a single long running compiler suite that can compile every version it once did.
    - nickysielicki 1y ago
      https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Standards.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Standards.html Is this inaccurate?
      - SideQuark 1y ago
        https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html GCC rarely, like never, supports the complete standards. Every release improves conformance, fixes errors, sometimes drops support for targets, perhaps changes how poorly defined areas work. As a result, likely no version compiles code the same as a previous version across all possible code. You’ll also note GCC doesn’t likely compile the variants of C++ it did before the 1998 version. And this type of page is just the tip of the iceberg https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/porting_to.html https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/porting_to.html. You’ll note changes made that can render previously compilable code no longer compilable. So no, you cannot naively think a new compiler version will simply run all your old code. On big projects upgrading is a huge endeavor to minimize problems. We could do every supported language the same way.

motorest 1y ago

> They can keep using the old standard. But they cannot upgrade. Ever. At least without requiring major maintenance work. Which means never. Do you understand what that means?

nickysielicki 1y ago
Every compiler continues to support old standards. What risk am I missing? This feels like a perfectly acceptable outcome for icky legacy code that is not essential enough to maintain.
- SideQuark 1y ago
  No they don't, not even close. Name a single long running compiler suite that can compile every version it once did.
  - nickysielicki 1y ago
    https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Standards.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Standards.html Is this inaccurate?
    - SideQuark 1y ago
      https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html GCC rarely, like never, supports the complete standards. Every release improves conformance, fixes errors, sometimes drops support for targets, perhaps changes how poorly defined areas work. As a result, likely no version compiles code the same as a previous version across all possible code. You’ll also note GCC doesn’t likely compile the variants of C++ it did before the 1998 version. And this type of page is just the tip of the iceberg https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/porting_to.html https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/porting_to.html. You’ll note changes made that can render previously compilable code no longer compilable. So no, you cannot naively think a new compiler version will simply run all your old code. On big projects upgrading is a huge endeavor to minimize problems. We could do every supported language the same way.