Clarification on minimum suported C++ version.

[DavidLoftus]

Many of the recent Pull Requests have experienced issues with build failures due to the old GCC 5 on Travis CI (this might be a bug in the travis config as the intended version seems to be 6). Many of the modern C++ features (11 and above) don't appear to be fully supported.

I couldn't find anything explicitly stating that this library should support C++98 compilers. Could you clarify what is the minimum version we should target, and then update the cmake config to reflect this.

Personally I don't see any reason to keep support for C++98, as this is a new library there is no legacy code that depends on it compiling in C++98. Additionally many features we know and love (smart pointers, lambdas, auto, move semantics, etc.)

[amiremohamadi]

My opinion is to keep DuckX as compatible as possible with different C++ versions, but if We have to, We can switch to higher versions (such as C ++11).

[apples]

It's worth considering that this library works with the docx format, which is mainly used on Windows desktops.

Mainstream support for VS 2013 ended a few months ago (extended support ends in 2024). VS 2015 has full C++11 support (except two-phase lookup and expression sfinae), and significant support for C++14.

In my opinion, it would be best to allow for C++11 or even C++14. Most contributors will assume C++11 at a minimum. MSVC and GCC default to C++14. It would also generally improve the cleanliness/safety/efficiency of the code.

Ideally, the required CMake version would also be bumped up to 3.1, to allow for use of the CXX_STANDARD property.

If you still wish to target C++98/03, then it would be best to make it explicit in the CMakeLists, either by using the CXX_STANDARD property, or by adding a -std=c++03 or equivalent compiler flag. This would ensure that contributors get compile errors when trying to use newer language features.