C++14, Old Compilers, and the Future

This release marks one of the last ones that will support GCC 4.x, Clang 3.4/3.5/3.6, and old version of Visual Studio 2015. It contains fixes for MinGW's bad std::wstring/std::u16string handling, and some minor changes to handle compilation issues and new warnings on GCC 7.x. Bugfixes for older compilers will continue into the future for some time.

For more information about what is happening with older compilers, see: http://sol2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/compilation.html#supported-compilers

sol2's future will be focusing on leveraging new C++17 features and types (std::any, std::variant, etc.) when they become widely-available across the Big Three™ compilers. Since sol2 has been feature-complete for a long time, future versions will more or less contain bells and whistles, and most of the code here is fairly bug-free for most uses.

Thank you for supporting sol2, and we hope you continue using it into the far future.