RFR: 8247910: Improve alignment and power-of-2 utilities using C++14

[Andrew Haley]

On 23/09/2020 09:24, Kim Barrett wrote:

> gcc5 is the first version of gcc that *claims* to completely support
> C++14.  That’s the only reason for setting it as the lower limit; it
> wasn’t based on data.
>
> Rather than potentially contort code to support what is now a pretty
> old version, I’d prefer we moved forward the minimum required
> version.

I'd prefer that too, but it's not just about us developers: there are
many distros building newer OpenJDK on older systems, and they may not
have the freedom to change the system-wide C compiler. Given that we
want to encourage people to use modern OpenJDK releases we should at
least try to accommodate older compilers.

I'd say that if we can use GCC 5 with minor changes we should do so,
but not if it makes a mess of the code.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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