On Fri, 28 Jun 2019 at 22:48, Robert Ramey via Boost wrote:

Note that C++ successfully strives to maintain backwards compatibility.

But OP is talking about forward compatibility [he want to compile Boost-1.47 with VS2017, there is a six year gap, the wrong way], which obviously is never gonna happen. degski -- @realdegski https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/06/middleeast/saudi-teen-death-pena... "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" - Kenneth E. Boulding

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019 at 08:41, Robert Ramey via Boost wrote:

Since C++17 is backward compatible with C++03

On thing I know, as a matter of fact (not guessing here), is the use of std::auto_ptr throughout that Boost-1.47 release. This thing alone is not a trivial fix. degski -- @realdegski https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/06/middleeast/saudi-teen-death-pena... "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" - Kenneth E. Boulding

On 29/06/2019 17:41, Robert Ramey wrote:

Since C++17 is backward compatible with C++03 - I would be very very surprise if it failed to work.  In fact I always test with std=C++03 flag to ensure exactly that.

We're not even talking about C++17, we're talking about VS2017. Quite apart from anything else already mentioned, the build scripts in Boost 1.47 don't know how to find the existence of the VS2017 compiler, since it didn't exist at the time and it uses a very different installation mechanism from prior versions of VS. (And the VS compiler build scripts were never particularly forward-compatible to begin with.) Since the OP didn't specify which part of the build was failing, let alone any specific error messages, it's just as likely for this to be the problem as any of the other issues. Ultimately, the already-given solution is straightforward: don't do that.