| Portability |

Historically, Spirit supported a lot of compilers, including (to some extent) poorly conforming compilers such as VC6. Spirit v1.6.x will be the last release that will support older poorly conforming compilers. Starting from Spirit v1.8.0, ill conforming compilers will not be supported. If you are still using one of these older compilers, you can still use Spirit v1.6.x.

The reason why Spirit v1.6.x worked on old non-conforming compilers is that the authors laboriously took the trouble of searching for workarounds to make these compilers happy. The process takes a lot of time and energy, especially when one encounters the dreaded ICE or "Internal Compiler Error". Sometimes searching for a single workaround takes days or even weeks. Sometimes, there are no known workarounds. This stifles progress a lot. And, as the library gets more progressive and takes on more advanced C++ techniques, the difficulty is escalated to even new heights.

Spirit v1.6.x will still be supported. Maintenance will still happen and bug fixes will still be applied. There will still be active development for the back-porting of new features introduced in Spirit v1.8.0 (and Spirit 1.9.0) to lesser able compilers; hopefully, fueled by contributions from the community. We welcome active support from the C++ community, especially those with special expertise on compilers such as older Borland and MSVC++ compilers.

Spirit 1.8.0 has been tested to compile and run properly on these compilers:

1. g++ 3.1 and above
2. Comeau 4.24.5
3. MSVC 7.1
4. Intel 7.1

If your compiler is sufficiently conforming, chances are, you can compile Spirit as it is or with minimal portability fixes here and there. Please inform us if your compiler is known to be ISO/ANSI conforming and is not in this list above. Feel free to post feedback to Spirit-general mailing list [Spirit-general@lists.sourceforge.net].

Copyright © 1998-2003 Joel de Guzman
Use, modification and distribution is subject to the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)