Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sun Jan 22 15:48:04 PST 2012


On Sunday, January 22, 2012 13:02:12 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/22/2012 12:57 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > "Alex Rønne Petersen"<xtzgzorex at gmail.com>  wrote in message
> > news:jfhppl$121g$1 at digitalmars.com...
> > 
> >> I see absolutely no reason to support an OS that Microsoft does not
> >> support anymore,
> > 
> > I don't think that's a good reason, since XP is still extremely relevent
> > despite MS having pulled support. However...
> 
> MS still officially supports XP. Just a couple days ago, I got an automated
> update on it from them. I think MS's latest schedule is to officially
> abandon it in 2014.
> 
> I think we ought to support things as long as MS officially does. After
> that, I'm game at abandoning official support, if for no other reason than
> not being able to develop/debug/test on those platforms.

It would be insane to not support XP at this point. Not only does XP still 
support it, but there are tons of people who have refused to move on. IIRC, 
Microsoft was effectively forced to support it longer because of the number of 
people (particularly companies) who refused to upgrade. However, I see no 
reason to support anything older than XP. Microsoft doesn't, and the number of 
people using Win2K or older is going to be rather small. For the most part, I 
think that if you support XP, you end up supporting 2K, since they're not all 
that different, so I don't know that it really hurts us to say that we support 
Win2K, but I'd love to be able to drop the extra stuff that we do to support 
pre-Win2K.

- Jonathan M Davis


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