Re: A case for C++11 in Octave

[c.]

Hi Carnë,

On 14 Nov 2014, at 16:32, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:

> I understand that the reason for not making use of it is to avoid making
> users in ancient systems to build a recent compiler.
> While I appreciate the value of being able to build on older systems, I'd
> like to believe that users on such systems are either more interested on
> older versions of Octave (they avoid upgrades, after all they're still
> running CentOS 5 and without EPEL), or are capable enough to build gcc
> themselves.

Unfortunately the situation is not that simple.
Many recent HPC systems, as for example 
http://www.hpc.cineca.it/hardware/plx are still using 
quite old systems:

  "Welcome to PLX DataPlex Cluster @ CINECA  -  RedHat EL 5.6!"

and even if other versions of gcc than the default (which is 4.1.2)
are available on that system, the most recent I managed to get
installed there is 4.7 which does not yet implement the c++11 standard 
completely.

Indeed I am able to compile gcc 4.9 myself and that's what I need to do on
my laptop anyway, but doing so on the cluster at the system level involves a 
lengthy and non trivial procedure.

I believe the same applies to more other scientific HPC or corporate systems 
than 
you would expect, so I don't think it is a good idea to drop backward 
compatibility just yet ...

Just my two .2€,
c.