Stop treating workarounds as a legitimate alternative to standards compliance
Particularly in the world of C++, where the delta between what the compiler accepts and what the standard says is quite large, it is common for people to report bugs against the compiler.
Often, however, these are met with refusals to fix the compiler, and claims that there are workarounds.
I would love you to change this policy.
Yes, sometimes there is a zero cost workaround to a particular flaw. But that's not a reason to not fix the bug. I write code that I wish to compile in g++, VC++, and sometimes even clang++. Being forced to avoid standard constructs just because they provoke a VC++ bug is aggravating in the extreme.
Please stop treating workarounds as if they were good enough. We want to be able to use the best possible C++ compiler.
DrPizza
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5 comments
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Alex
commented
Both GCC and Clang have already implemented the complete C++11 feature set.
Such is the the power of open source. -
Ofek Shilon
commented
Knowing the amount of effort MS pours into backward compatibility (and the amount of heat they take when old programs break) I suspect the reason for preferring workarounds is not 'inability to implement ...', but rather reluctance to break existing code. Personally I respect this consideration.
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David Ikeda commented
While I'd love to have these features properly implemented, I think it's bad for us to make assumptions about Microsoft's attitude towards these features. You may be correct, but the attitude might very well alternatively be that they are providing workarounds simply to try to make up for their inability to implement these features in a more timely way (not necessarily seeing the workarounds as anything but a temporary solution).
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Miriam
commented
Agree. Riccardo, there are plenty of examples on Connect.
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Riccardo Marcangelo
commented
Could you provide any examples?
