Support for Visual Studio 2013

[Cellule]

I am wondering how long do we plan to support VS 2013?
In PR #1444 I started using constexpr on some functions to avoid using macros.

Before I reverted those change, I believe it would be worth checking if we planned to drop support soon.

[Cellule]

@curtisman @digitalinfinity @dilijev @LouisLaf @MikeHolman Any thoughts on the matter ?

[dilijev]

constexpr is a great feature we're missing out on. This isn't the first time it has come up. Since VS 2015 has a community edition that anyone can use for free, I'm seeing less of a compelling reason to keep supporting downlevel products because "people have already paid for those". Possibly you could argue "people are used to the workflow" but I don't think much of the community is depending on a VS 2013 workflow for our project.

[ianwjhalliday]

Agreed.

I may be mistaken, but I believe VS 2013 is the only non-fully compliant C++ 11 compiler we support. It would be nice to have the full C++11 feature set available for us to use, by dropping VS 2013.

• Use of constexpr came up once before in Chakracore build break on VS2013 RC #309
• We thought about using C++11 char16_t and u"..." for xplat strings in cross-plat: wrap wchar type and string literal #456 but couldn't because VS 2013 doesn't have it

I believe there were one or two other issues that came up where it would have been nice to have full C++11 support.

[tcare]

+1, though I seem to remember there being issues about downlevel and ARM.

[curtisman]

Node still support building with VS2013.

[dilijev]

^ And that right there is all the reason we need to keep supporting VS 2013. :P

[ianwjhalliday]

That is too bad. Doesn't mean node-chakracore needs to support VS2013, but reasonable to do so.