Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, January 23, 2012 00:14:27 Stewart Gordon wrote:
> On 22/01/2012 23:48, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> > 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.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Principle of least surprise.  Somebody compiling for a given target platform
> should expect whether it runs on a given version of the platform to be down
> to the APIs the program uses, not the language the program is written in.

Except that druntime and Phobos use those APIs. So, it matters. And since the 
number of people using pre-Win2K is extremely low, I see that as a complete 
non-issue.

> Moreover, it seems a lot of currently maintained software still claims to
> support Win2000 - Firefox and OpenOffice for instance.  For a whole
> programming language, the majority of whose users will be writing much
> simpler programs than this, to have higher system requirements than this
> seems absurd.

As I said in my previous post, while ideally we'd say that we don't support 
anything older than WinXP, saying that we support Win2K probably costs us 
nothing. It's the pre-Win2K that's the problem with the lack of W functions 
and the like.

The next version of Windows beyond that that it would be useful to be able to 
say that we don't support anything older than is Vista. I would _love_ to be 
able to do that Vista is the oldest that we support, because Vista added a 
bunch of useful API calls and the like. But we obviously can't do that anytime 
soon. The user base for XP is huge. The same can't be said of pre-Win2K.

So, I really think that we should say that we don't support pre-Win2K, and I'd 
like to say that we don't support pre-XP, but I don't think that it hurts us 
any to say that we support Win2K.

- Jonathan M Davis