Windows 2000 support

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, June 06, 2012 04:09:12 tim krimm wrote:
> On Tuesday, 5 June 2012 at 14:43:47 UTC, mta`chrono wrote:
> > Drop support since even Microsoft dropped support. Even if
> > druntime will
> > support Windows 2000, all my the programs I code will at least
> > require
> > Windows XP.
> 
> I agree with removing the windows 2000 requirement from the run
> time library.
> 
> What about the DMD compiler itself?
> Does DMD have a Windows XP+ requirement as well?
> I would like to request that DMD itself not depend on XP.
> But only if does not require a lot of work.
> 
> BTW - I am posting from a Windows 2000 machine.
> Windows 2000 is handed for older machines.
> It is also good for bare bone machines from tiger direct.
> Yes I also use linux on these machines in dual boot mode.
> 
> I have several old legal licensed copies.
> I can fairly easily install and uninstall windows 2000.
> I do not have to deal with Microsoft's registration headaches.
> Believe it or not I had a customer that required windows 98
> support last year.
> 
> Embarcadero (formerly Borland) C++ Builder still supports these
> older systems.

dmd should run on older machines - though I would be very concerned about 
running out of memory if much in the way of templates or CTFE is used. It's 
the libraries that have issues. Supporting older OSes means disallowing newer 
OS function calls, which can be quite problematic. For instance, some of what 
std.datetime does would be easier if we could require Vista or newer, since 
Microsoft added some time-related stuff in Vista. As it is, it requires a 
function which is only in XP or newer (which is really weird considering that 
the function which does the opposite conversion is on Win2K).

We obviously can't require that users have anything newer than XP, because XP 
is still used far too much for that, but in general, the sooner that older 
OSes are unsupported, the better off libraries which use system calls are. 
Regardless, dmd should run on older machines as long as they perform well 
enough to compile what you're trying to compile. dmd doesn't require any of 
the newer system calls.

- Jonathan M Davis