Do we need Win95/98/Me support?
Nick Sabalausky
a at a.a
Sun Jan 22 21:31:24 PST 2012
"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.716.1327278278.16222.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 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.
>
I agree on all points.
But you know, the really bizarre thing is, *all* MS has to do to win over
all the XP people (or at least the majority of them) is two simple things:
1. *Allow* people to use the XP UI (and no, I don't mean Luna). It's that
simple: Just *quit* making UI changes mandatory (a lesson Mozilla could
stand to learn, too, especially since they allegedly care so much about
configurability).
2. Ditch the AV-crippling and driver-revocation bullshit.
That's it. That's all they have to do. The core of Win7 is basically solid
(from what I hear). But they can't handle that, can they? Talk about digging
one's own grave. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Vista and Win7 (and Win8)
have not only caused people to stick with XP, but also caused a lot of
Win->Lin converts - I'm getting closer and closer to that myself. All they
(or Mozilla) seem to care about anymore is just fucking around with the UI
everyone already liked - and redoing it over, and over, and over.
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