[Next] [Up] [Previous] [Contents]
Next: D. Credits Up: Aspell .27.2 alpha A Previous: B. To Do   Contents

C. Support for Gcc 2.7.2

(and other non-standard compliance compilers)

My original plan was to program in such a way that it would Aspell would compile under Gcc 2.7.2 however after releasing a rather nasty bug in 2.7.2 with nested typed I have desired to drop all support for G++ 2.7.2. As of Aspell .27 all hope for being able to compile under Gcc 2.7.2 is lost as I am now using many modern C++ features which are simply not present in C++ most notably template specialization and template members. Egcs 1.1.1 is a very good standards compliant compiler and that is now the officially supported compiler. However as Egcs 1.1.1 is relatively new and, except for namespaces, provides little new functionality I will continue to support Egcs 1.0.3 and Gcc 2.8.1 for as long as possible.

Yes, my code could be rewritten so that is could compile under Gcc 2.7.2 but Why? Using modern C++ has probably accelerated the development of this library my at least 50%. And for that matter why stop at Gcc 2.7.2 why not go all out and totally rewrite my code pure C. I hope you see my point.

However that does not mean I want to sacrifice portability unnecessarily. If you see any of part of my code that in not Standard C++ please let me know. My hope is that my code could compile on all Standard compliance C++ compilers with the addition of a few extra header files from SGI's STL.

As I side note I think that Mozilla's C++ portability guide (http://www.mozilla.org/docs/tplist/catBuild/portable-cpp.html) could be summed up in one sentence: Program in the dark ages of C++.


[Next] [Up] [Previous] [Contents]
Next: D. Credits Up: Aspell .27.2 alpha A Previous: B. To Do   Contents

1999-03-01