[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Drop support for gcc-2.95

[Uoti Urpala]

On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 10:05 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:

> yes, id like to know that too ...
> 
> * mixing declarations and code, seems few really want that, my oppinion here
>   is it might be nice in some cases but its not enough to drop support for a
>   compiler ...

The cost of avoiding them is higher than just the lost usefulness. Once
you get used to them in other code it's natural to write them quite
frequently, and they appear in patches, so avoiding them requires
several changes to code.

> * 10 params asms (we also would have to drop support for several other gcc 
>   versions)

Any idea which gcc versions those would be? I think few people would
care about 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2. Debian stable has gcc 3.3 as the default gcc
but it also has a gcc-3.4 package available, and installing it should be
no harder than installing other MPlayer build requirements. Requiring
4.x would probably cause a sharper drop in users who could compile
MPlayer without upgrading.

> * intrinsics, well gcc until 4.? generated terribly bad code for intrinsics
> * some gnu stuff which would make mplayer no longer comple on iso-c compilers
> 
> anything else?

I was mainly thinking of C99 features like compound literals (which 2.95
supports partially?) and flexible array members. They're usually not
hard to work around using C89 syntax but still allow for nicer code.