What are going to be the set of compilers that are supported and how old?

[schwehr]

Initially, we need some discussion on this topic.

[neteler]

FWIW, we have a similar discussion at time in grass-dev:

• https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2021-February/094954.html
• --> thread: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2021-February/thread.html#94913
• RFC forthcoming at https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/RFC

[schwehr]

@neteler Thanks! I need to link to a few of these. e.g.

• https://trac.osgeo.org/geos/wiki/RFC5 by @mloskot
• https://gdal.org/development/rfc/rfc68_cplusplus11.html by @schwehr (based on geos RFC5)
• https://abseil.io/docs/cpp/platforms/platforms
• The C99 discussion with libtiff

And more, especially if they are in core libraries written in C.

And should have included this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compilers#C_compilers But I not that table doesn't reflect necessarily newer versions of compilers. I see a note about GCC 5.

Not sure if it should have it's own issue, but what standard should be used for shapelib. C89 is (in my oppinion) not a good standard to stick with, so C99, C11, or?

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)#History
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C11_(C_standard_revision)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C17_(C_standard_revision)

[rouault]

I'd stick for now with what VC2015 supports (C99), since that's our baseline for GDAL. Anyway shapelib is hopefully mostly feature complete now and not necessarily in need of deep rework :-)

[schwehr]

It looks like recent autoconf setups set C99 by default.

[thbeu]

Regarding VS, shapelib requires VS2012 (when configuring with -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF) or VS2017 otherwise.

[rouault]

I think we can close this now