PS: As HPC Systems came up: They usually count in decades. GCC 4.8 was released in 2013, so rule of thumb would be that at about 2023 everyone is using GCC 4.8+. But you can also look for RHEL support (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/19458) RHEL 7 uses GCC 4.8 where RHEL 6 is supported till end of 2020 (not counting extended support) I'm wondering, do those projects require the latest version of Boost? And why can't they use later versions of compilers? AFAIK compilers have improved a lot so using old compilers seems a bit weird. No, for the same reasons: Not old enough. So thinking about that it should be fine. For why: Management and compatibility: We want to build something here
that is guaranteed to run there so we have to keep the requirements to the bare minimum. No point in arguing, I tried...