End of life for Windows Server 2003 R2 is July 14, 2015

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 25 June 2015 at 13:53:40 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 6/24/15 12:10 PM, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>>
>> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows-server-2003/
>>
>> Which means that (strictly speaking), in 3 weeks time, there 
>> will be
>> *no* operating system that supports CodeView debugging.
>>
>> This is an elongated way of asking
>>
>> "Can I remove -gc yet?"
>>
>> But as I'm not a Windows user, I'll have to ask how you guys 
>> deal with
>> debugging, and if you still rely on CV being emitted from DMD, 
>> you must
>> hurry up to implement an alternative!
>
> XP still has more market share right now than Windows 8.1, and 
> that was EOL in April 2014.
>
> I think it's safe to say the fact that the OS goes EOL doesn't 
> mean we should stop supporting it. And server OS migration 
> moves much slower usually.
>
> So I'd say no.

We already dropped official support for XP some time ago. If 
someone really wants to use an older platform that isn't even 
supported by the folks that made it, I'd argue that they should 
just use an older version of the D compiler from when that OS 
actually was supported. It's enough of a burden trying to support 
all of the platforms that we support right now without worrying 
about platforms which aren't even supported by the folks that 
made them. And anyone who uses an OS that's not supported is just 
begging for trouble anyway given how the number of known security 
holes is just going to increase.  Also, no new software is going 
to target unsupported platforms anyway, so why support it? The 
old stuff can continue to work with older compilers that were 
actually written for that platform, and the new stuff is going to 
be on current platforms.

Personally, I'm all for dropping official support of a platform 
when the folks making it drop support for it. It's the simplest 
that way and helps reduce how much we have to worry about.

- Jonathan M Davis