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+C++11 in Skia |
+============= |
+ |
+Skia is exploring the use of C++11. As a library, we are technically limited |
+by what our clients support and what our build bots support. |
+ |
+Skia may also be limited by restrictions we choose put on ourselves. This |
+document is not concerned with C++11 policy in Skia, only its technical |
+feasibility. This is about what we can use, a superset of what we may use. |
+ |
+The gist: |
+ - C++11 the language as supported by GCC 4.4 or later is probably usable. |
+ - If you break a bot, that feature is not usable. |
+ - The C++11 standard library can't generally be used. |
+ - Local statics are not thread safe. |
+ |
+ |
+Clients |
+------- |
+ |
+The clients we pay most attention to are Chrome, Android, Mozilla, and a few |
+internal Google projects. |
+ |
+Chrome builds with a recent Clang on Mac and Linux and with a recent MSVC on |
+Windows. These toolchains are new enough to not be the weak link to use any |
+C++11 language feature. But Chrome still supports Mac OS X 10.6, which does |
+not ship with a C++11 standard library. So [Chrome has banned the use of the |
+C++11 standard library](http://chromium-cpp.appspot.com/). Some header-only |
+features are probably technically fine, but the Mac toolchain will prevent us |
+from even trying at compile time as long as we target 10.6 as our minimum API |
+level. |
+ |
+Chrome intentionally disables thread-safe initialization of static variables, |
+and MSVC doesn't support it at all, so we cannot rely on that. |
+ |
+Android builds with either a recent GCC or a recent Clang. They're generally |
+not a weak link for C++11 language features. Android's C++ standard library |
+has always been a pain, but since we can't use it anyway (see Chrome), don't |
+worry about it. |
+ |
+Mozilla's current weak link is a minimum requirement of GCC 4.6. Most features |
+marked in red on Mozilla's C++11 [feature |
+matrix](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Using_CXX_in_Mozilla_code) are |
+marked that way because they arrived in GCC 4.7 or GCC 4.8. Their |
+minimum-supported Clang and MSVC toolchains are great. They also appear to ban |
+the C++ standard library. |
+ |
+Internal Google projects tend to support C++11 completely, including the |
+full C++11 standard library. |
+ |
+ |
+Bots |
+---- |
+ |
+Most of our bots are pretty up-to-date: the Windows bots use MSVC 2013, the Mac |
+bots a recent Clang, and the Linux bots GCC 4.8 or a recent Clang. Our Android |
+bots use a recent toolchain from Android (see above), and our Chrome bots use |
+Chrome's toolchains (see above). I'm not exactly sure what our Chrome OS bots |
+are using, but they've never been a problem. |
+ |
+A few miscellaneous compile-only bots are actually our current overall weak link: |
+ - Our NaCl builds use an old non-PNaCl toolchain, which is based on GCC |
+ 4.4. GCC 4.4 has some support for C++11, but it's not nearly complete. |
+ There is no upgrade path except PNaCl; even the very latest NaCl toolchain |
+ is GCC 4.4, while PNaCl is based on Clang 3.4 (with complete C++11 support). |
+ - Our iOS builds are driven from a Mac 10.7 machine using some unknown old Clang. |
+ Who knows how old that is or what it supports? It's probably due for an update. |
+ |
+If we were to eliminate the problems of the NaCl and iOS bots, our ability to |
+use C++11 would match Mozilla's list nearly identically. |