Proposals:Dropping Support for Visual Studio 6.0

It has been suggested that ITK should drop support of the Visual Studio 6.0 compiler.

http://www.itk.org/pipermail/insight-users/2008-May/025838.html

Real world issues

Visual Studio 6 is the most recurrent compiler insight-developers have to cope with:

• http://www.itk.org/pipermail/insight-users/2006-February/016823.html
• http://lists.boost.org/boost-users/2007/12/32632.php
• http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2009-April/012094.html
• http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2009-April/012180.html
• http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2009-February/011850.html
• http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2008-September/011087.html
• http://www.vtk.org/pipermail/vtkusers/2009-April/100478.html

Motivation

• Lack of support for template partial specialization
• The compiler is about 10 years old
• It is out the market (Microsoft doesn't sell it anymore)

User's Opinions

Please add your opinions here:

In Favor of Dropping Support

• Hans Johnson: My vote has stayed the same for many years now. I think that the need to support partial specialization is critical for future of ITK. Dropping support for VS6 will allow us to move the toolkit forward.
• Alex. Gouaillard
• Gert Wollny (I filed the bug report)
• Brian Gee Chacko
• Mathieu Malaterre: ITK community should focus on writing algorithm, and not on supporting broken compiler (VS7.1, VS 2005 & VS 2008 are even free of charge).
• Tom Vercauteren
• Rashindra Manniesing
• David Witten
• Marcel Koek
• Marius Staring
• Stefan Klein

Against Dropping Support

• Bill Lorensen: Partial specialization can be implemented in Visual Studio 6; see itkImageTransformHelper.h
  • Comment (Gert Wollny): No, the example shows function (template) overloading and not partial template specialization - compare e.g. D. Vandevoorde and N. M. Josuttis "C++ Templates" pp.179-204.