Updates to the WindowsAPI translation instructions; D2 only?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, August 01, 2013 16:00:09 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/1/2013 3:28 PM, Stewart Gordon wrote:
> > What do people think we should do?  Opinions please!
> 
> Even supporting XP is problematic because of the badly broken thread local
> storage support for DLLs in it, which D heavily relies on. I wouldn't say
> this for a C++ compiler, but for D, I kinda feel that Windows 7 should be
> the minimum.

I would _love_ to require Windows 7 at minimum, but I'd always figured that we 
should support all of the versions of Windows that Microsoft currently 
supports, which would mean supporting XP until April 2014 and Vista until 
April 2017.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle

Certainly, right now, for all of druntime and Phobos to work, you need at 
least XP. We've already dropped all of the Win9x support and most (all?) of 
the Win2k support.

Regardless, the biggest gain by far will be being able to ditch support for XP 
and require at least Vista. As bad as Vista was, it had some major 
improvements to the Win32 API (like adding a proper condition variable).

- Jonathan M Davis