On 1/23/2021 6:20 AM, John Maddock via Boost wrote:
I have no solution for this, but I note that neither do we have CI, nor tests on https://www.boost.org/development/tests/develop/developer/summary.html that aren't Intel x86. The compiler list has shrunk to msvc/clang/gcc as well.
I note that at least in theory, other platforms/architectures could be integrated into Drone CI (either the CppAlliance one, or our own), but someone would have to offer to host the clients running the tests.
Any thoughts/solutions?
My main thought is that, while you are correct about not testing on something other than Intel x64, from the programmers viewpoint he is writing code in C++ and not for a particular platform/architecture. At the most he may be writing code with attention to a compiler or OS, but hardly ever does a particular CPU itself come into play unless lower level assembly code, tailored to a CPU, comes into play. So realistically the programmer does not care about a CPU at all. Even if a test were to fail on some other platform/architecture, where it normally passes on Intel x64, what would a programmer do about it ? Probably very little. Maybe, at the very most, report a problem to the compiler running on that platform/architecture that their is something wrong somewhere. But for the vast, vast majority of times such a problem would hardly indicate anything wrong with the code itself. I offer all this up as a possibly valid reason why testing a Boost library on some other platform/architecture, other than the usual Intel x64 on Mac/Linux/Windows, is not going to be a big priority for any Boost library developer/maintainer.