Re:Goals and Priorities for C++
by joshuamorton on Friday May 22, 2020 @02:45AM
(#23269297)
Specifically, absl (Google's C++ library already provides this guarantee). In general the idea is that they will provide backwards compatibility for 5 years, and provide tooling to update source code to new constructs. This is covered somewhere in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tISy7EJQPzI
> Support maintaining and evolving software written in C++ for decades
...
> This requirement should not imply compatibility, but instead some (likely tool-assisted) migratability.
I think the idea is you can gradually deprecate outdated features if there's a way of automatically refactoring them out.
So you might still be able to compile old code, you might just need to run it through a bunch of migration scripts first.