Richard Guenther wrote:
At least you'd have the chance that reported bugs may eventually get fixed - with a 3.x (or even 4.0.x) release there's no chance of that unless you are willing to pay (and find) someone to do it.
Which of course is one possibility, it is not always clear that updating to the latest version of a compiler is best for the user. As developers we prefer to have people using the latest version for all sorts of reasons, and for users there are benefits, but on the other hand the dont-fix-it-if-it-is-not-broken approach sometimes means that using an old version that works is appropriate. AdaCore has some customers using versions of GNAT as old as 3.14, because they have baselined tool support for their projects. Actually in such a case AdaCore does not try to fix problems (the whole point of the baselining is to avoid any kind of changes to the tools), but they still offer help and guidance for working around any problems, which can be invaluable when using an obsolete version. Using an obsolete version with no support at all does seem risky. One thing to add to the benefits of moving to a more recent version is that the warnings are improved, so you may find that doing the work to switch to the latest version smokes out some bugs in advance. Now that can be worth a lot in terms of invested time and effort!
