LibreOffice Continues Moving Along With C++11 Adoption

With the recent release of LibreOffice 4.4 there was a significant bump in compiler requirements in order to begin allowing LibreOffice developers to use basic C++11 functionality. Going forward, the compiler requirements will continue to rise as the developers of this open-source office suite seek to utilize more modern C++ features.

Michael Stahl of Red Hat presented last weekend at FOSDEM about LibreOffice and its C++ requirements. LibreOffice developers are after using this latest major revision to the C++ language and with the recent v4.4 milestone went from requiring GCC 4.1 to now needing GCC 4.6 as a minimum requirement. LLVM Clang 3.1 also became the new minimum requirement as did MSVC over MSVC 2010.

With LibreOffice 4.5, developers are looking at requiring MSVC 2013 on the Microsoft side. LibreOffice developers also want to ultimately bump the GCC requirement to GCC 4.7 but for now GCC 4.6 is the minimum. The Document Foundation meanwhile has been building LibreOffice binaries with GCC 4.8. This is while GCC 5 will be released in the next few months and LLVM Clang 3.6 is almost ready to be unveiled.

Upgrading the LibreOffice compiler requirements allow for features like non-static data member initializers, alias templates, variadic templates, initializer lists, etc. Those wishing to learn more can see the FOSDEM LibreOffice C++ slides.

Many other open-source projects continue better adopting C++11 support too with the compiler support being in good shape, except for those enterprise distributions and others still bounded to operate on older GCC/Clang release series.