Allowed language features

GROMACS uses C99 for C files and C++11 for C++ files. C++ has a lot of features, but to keep the source code maintainable and easy to read, we will avoid using some of them in Gromacs code. The basic principle is to keep things as simple as possible. For compatiblity certain work-arounds are required because not all compilers support these standards fully.

• MSVC supports only a subset of C99 and work-arounds are required in those cases.
• Before 7.0 (partial support in 6.5) CUDA didn’t support C++11. Therefore any header file which is needed (or likely will be nedded) by CUDA should not use C++11.
• We should be able to use virtually all C++ features outside of the header files required by CUDA code (and OpenCL kernels), since we have gradually moved to compilers that have full support for C++11.

C++ Standard Library

GROMACS code must support the lowest common denominator of C++11 standard library features available on supported platforms. Some modern features are useful enough to warrant back-porting. Consistent and forward-compatible headers are provided in src/gromacs/compat/ as described in the Library documentation