Re: [4diac-dev] Migrating forte to +11

[Alois Zoitl <alois.zoitl@xxxxxx>]

Hi,

first of all thanks to Jose for bringing up this point. This is definitely a matter we should openly discuss and also document. The mailing list is a good
starting point for that.

I have rather mixed feelings here. At first I see the cool features of modern C++ (e.g., lambdas, const expr) which can help to improve code quality and flash
size.

However I also see that we have a very diverse community with many different OSes (e.g., I hear that ThreadX is coming back via some Microsoft initiative),
different CPUs and memory capacity. While I thought most of our hardware will be arm and Linux based by now it looks not like that will come. Also RAM is still
a crucial thing in many devices of our users. Just have a look at the current discussion in the forum.

Therefore, in order to not limit the applicability of 4diac FORTE I think we should proceed here with great caution. Also I don't think we should spend our
limited resources on the transformation because of transformation. Especially because of our great set of test case. Thanks to all who worked on that.

There are places where I see some immediate benefits (e.g., replacing our single linked list with STL vector), which can reduce our memory usage further. But it
would need some experiments to see if STL is not bringing other drawbacks regarding memory (e.g., memory blocked by support functions).

I started a wiki page [1] for collecting potential improvements quite some time ago. We could use that to capture and prioritize such features.

All this caution I presented in this mail is mainly concerned with the core infrastructure. As already over the last years I see it important that for modules
and functions targeting bigger machines or OSes/CPUs with modern compilers that we use all features that help us. With that we can not only learn but also
better understand the implications it would have if we would add it to the core functionalities.

Cheers,
Alois

[1] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_4diac_Wiki/Development/Breaking_FORTE_Changes_Collection



On Mon, 2020-06-08 at 09:27 +0000, Jose Cabral wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> in the past weeks, forte code from the +11 standard were spotted in the core and some communication modules, giving problems to old compilers not supporting this standard. The core code in branch 1.12.x is now cleaned of +11, but not in some modules (since removing from there might take too much work for a release branch).
>
> I just want to open the discussion to know your opinions about if we should start moving forte’s code to the standard +11 officially from the next version or not.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jose Cabral
>
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