Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

Alex Rønne Petersen xtzgzorex at gmail.com
Sun Jan 22 11:58:45 PST 2012


On 22-01-2012 20:55, Denis Shelomovskij wrote:
> In this thread I would like a reason of trying to support Win95/98/Me to
> be discussed. I would like to see arguments for and against and, when
> there will be enough arguments, to vote, make a decision, and add
> supported Windows OS-es list to the docs, because now D is stamping
> itself by having undefined behaviour on Windows: one just can't tell,
> what will program in D do on certain version of Windows: crash/partially
> works/works?
>
> My reasons against trying to support Win95/98/Me in D2:
> * In Russia we have lots of outdated PC-s, and according to statistics
> of visitors of one site with educational thematics Win95+Win98+Me / All
> Windows visitors is 3+5+2 = 10 / 9_925 ~ 0.1%.
> * If trying to support Win95/98/Me will be discarded, we can remove:
> 1. `std.__fileinit`
> 2. lots of small code duplicates like `useWfuncs ? WinFuncW() : WinFuncA()`
> 3. some more complicated stuff like `SelUni` template in
> `std.windows.registry` or Windows `getcwd` implementation in `std.file`
> * Developers will not be forced to create things that was enumerated in
> previous paragraph and fill themselves doing ungrateful work, because:
> 1. Even command line arguments has never been implemented for
> Win95/98/Me in druntime (at least according to Git history of
> `rt.dmain2`, Issue 5926)
> 2. For more than 8 months even Windows 2000 isn't supported at all
> (every D2 program crashes since 2.053, Issue 6024).
> * This rejection isn't a breaking change because Win95/98/Me has never
> been supported by D2 (see previous paragraph).
> * This rejection will allow to just add supported Windows OS-es list to
> the docs by claiming Win95/98/Me as unsupported.

I see absolutely no reason to support an OS that Microsoft does not 
support anymore, especially when it has such a negligible amount of users...

-- 
- Alex


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