Mon, 11/29/2021 - 11:52
Open CASCADE Technology works on a vast range of platforms, and it is one of high priorities to keep supporting major compilers.
I have prepared a short anonymous questionnaire to collect some statistics, and you are welcome to share your opinion on this forum thread.
As you may notice, OCCT 7.5.0 still could be built with Visual Studio 2008, and OCCT 7.6.0 supports Visual Studio 2010+, while many projects rapidly drop support of "old" compilers. For instance, Qt 6.2 requires VS2019 for building.
New compilers bring new features, but practically speaking C++11 is a good base for development, and I could barely see what kind of a breaking new feature of C++14/C++17/C++20 would make such mature project as OCCT suddenly much better from end-user point of view or would improve it's development pace. Still, supporting legacy compilers with incomplete C++11 support (like VS2010-VS2013) is an extra maintenance burden to the project, and an awkward restriction to new developers.
Personally, VS2015 looks like a most reliable minimal compiler version to work with nowadays, and I can barely see any use cases of projects still using VS2010-VS2013. Well, I think that there are still many projects using these and even older versions of Visual Studio, but they are in maintenance state and are not upgraded to newer OCCT releases anyway.