The future of the WindowsAPI bindings project

[Stewart Gordon]

On 13/05/2012 16:13, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
<snip excessive quote>
>> On this basis, what should we do? Indeed, what exactly is D2's official
>> minimum supported version of Windows? Me, NT4 or 2000?
>
> 2000, AFAIK. There is currently a pull request to repair Windows 2000 support in druntime.

That would be my inkling.  But has it actually been stated somewhere, or are you just 
assuming?

>> Advantages of keeping the Win9x versioning in the bindings:
>> - Enables those D1 programmers that remain to write stuff that runs
>> under Win9x.
>> - Saves the effort of going through removing it
>
> I think we should just get rid of it. For D2, we'll have to remove the 9x stuff at some
> point anyway. And keeping the 9x stuff around for D1 is not worth it, since D1 is being
> discontinued kind-of soon. Besides, does anyone actually write Windows 9x programs in D
> anymore?

Probably nobody of significance writes programs to target Win9x now.  But some people are 
hesitant to move on from supporting a given OS version.  If Mozilla and OpenOffice are 
still claiming to support Win2000, there are probably people out there still claiming to 
support Win9x.

But any people who are programming D for Win9x will already have the bindings.  And if 
they do an SVN update and find that the protection against accidentally using Win2000+ 
APIs on which they relied has gone, they can update back to the old version.  So maybe 
you're right.  Still, let's see what the others say.

<snip>
> If someone really wants to, they can put the Windows 9x stuff into the D1 branch of
> druntime. But let's not put it into master.

There's no "D1 branch of druntime".  Under D1, there's just Phobos.

Stewart.