Ansi vs Unicode API

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:18:57 -0500, Walter Bright  
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> Microsoft doesn't break support for older Windows when it comes out with  
> newer ones. Supporting the full range of Windows is essentially trivial.

For the compiler, yes.  For library code, not so much.  If you want to use  
newer features of the MS libraries, you must abandon support older Windows.

One example:  Tango's Process class tries to avoid popping up a console  
window when running a script, but it uses a flag to CreateProcess that is  
not supported on Windows 98 or earlier.  The decision was made to just  
simply not support Windows 98 or earlier because it wasn't worth throwing  
out that feature simply to support users of Windows 98 (who frankly,  
should retire their likely now-paperweights).  This is probably a milder  
case which causes no harm on a win98 box.  However, calling a new function  
would make the lib not compile or fail to run.

-Steve