During the TiGL development, we tried to make TiGL backwards compatible as much as possible. This includes the support for old systems with old compilers, support for Qt 4 and Python 2.7.

C++ 11 opens up many new programming paradigms that we don't want to miss anymore. Many of them will improve the quality of the TiGL source code, such as std::unique_pointer, lambda functions... to name just a few. Since C++ 11 is not exactly new anymore (8 years old), it is time to move on. This will affect the systems of which TiGL runs. The minimum requirements are now

• GCC 4.8
• Visual C++ 2013

The choice of the C++ version also affects directly TiGL's Python support. On Windows, Python 2.7 extensions have to be compiled with Visual C 2008, which is not compatible with C++ 11. Therefore, we won't be able to provide Python 2.7 extensions for Windows with a C++ 11 based source code. Since Python 2.7 will retire in 2020, it is now the right time to abandon Python 2 support. TiGL will still be available from Python 3!

TLDR

• TiGL 3 will now use C++11 code
• No support for VC 2008 and GCC < 4.8
• No support for Python 2.7 anymore