why to (not) support "older" compiler versions

[Sebastiaan Koppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 November 2015 at 08:08:28 UTC, yawniek wrote:
> i have seen many PR's and also Forum entries that deal with the 
> problem of newer features of the compiler not being able and 
> then patching or working around that to support older compiler 
> versions.

For end-users it is always good to support a lot of versions.

For me its the opposite; that handwritten loop I wrote to replace 
groupBy - while only being 6 loc - had a bug; I had to install 
dvm to compile with 2.066 and it didn't work in cygwin / mingw, 
so I had to manually edit environment variables.

Maybe D needs a compatibility library that has backports for all 
the new fancy stuff. Then again, I rather write the occasional 
classic loop than double/triple the work on new features.