On Apr 11, 2013, at 11:02 AM, Markus Engel wrote:
Well, no, on linux, sorry. But I don't quite get the problem. There are lots of people who seem to have managed to make a recent version of gcc work on mac os. Of course you'd have to recompile all the necessary libraries from scratch when switching to a compiler with a different abi. As far as I understood that, Apple switched from gcc to clang because newer version of gcc are gplv3? Is Inkscape compilable with clang?
Just for compatibility reasons in general, it's good to avoid requirements on c++11.
Keeping Inkscape source compatible with g++ and clang is good, since there are people using other compilers, including some proprietary/expensive ones that give some good performance boosts. Occasionally people with such will raise a compatibility issue.
Also with c++11 in general we have to be careful of not treating it as a monolithic switch. There are different subsets of features implemented in different versions of compilers. I'd done some checking recently, and even the more recent g++ versions had covered only perhaps a third of c++11 features.
Oh, and I've been burned by past attempts to use non-standard compiler versions on OS X. I'd given it some earnest tries at the behest of some other devs, but things got so bad I had to manually wipe all traces of dev tools off my system and start over clean. So it's definitely not something we want to push as a hard requirement for average users or potential contributors.