Ansi vs Unicode API

[Walter Bright]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> 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.

True, but that's an app issue, not a dev tools issue.


> 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.

I don't see any problem with not going to extra effort to support Win9x. 
I just see a problem with gratuitously breaking it.