Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, January 23, 2012 18:13:11 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Todd VanderVeen" <tdv at part.net> wrote in message
> news:jfkmod$gst$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 
> > I would not make supporting an OS no longer supported by its vendor a
> > priority,
> 
> I still don't see how that's even relevent.

Presumably, if the OS is no longer supported, then it's no longer used by 
enough people for it to be worth our time and effort to support. But that 
presupposes that the number of users is related to the level of support by the 
OS vendor, which in the case of XP, probably isn't really true. It may be by 
the time that Microsoft's support for XP is completely gone though.

Ultimately, the question is user base. How many D programmers program for pre-
XP Windows? I would expect the number to be very few. And given that D didn't 
really exist at that point, it's not like there are legacy programs that would 
need to be supported either. It would pretty much purely be D programmers 
writing new code for old systems which might be affected by the lack of Win9x 
support.

At this point though, the key thing is being able to stop worrying about 
whether the W functions are supported. If we can assume at least Win2K, then 
the W functions are supported, and beyond that, the version of Windows doesn't 
really matter. None of the API calls that we're using at this point even need 
XP instead of Win2K. Beyond that, the question would be whether we could 
assume Vista and use its new API calls (XP didn't really add many calls), and 
the answer to that right now is obviously no.

- Jonathan M Davis