[webkit-dev] Switch to std::variant?

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 6:14 AM, zan at falconsigh.net wrote:
> Some GCC-and-libstdc++ configurations would still require a fallback 
> implementation

After the std::optional fiasco, I'm pretty nervous about the state of 
using new C++ 17 features.

We've wound up in a situation where we're OK with increasing the 
compiler requirement to recent versions... as long as WebKit continues 
to build with ancient libstdc++. So increasing use of more C++ 17 
standard library features seems difficult, and of really limited 
benefit if we're going to need to keep a fallback WTF implementation 
around, which will receive limited testing from us, but which will be 
used by most of our users in practice (at least for GTK).

This is a hard problem. I don't have any answers. But I don't think our 
status quo is very good. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185198 
is still unresolved and I'm out of ideas....

Michael