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

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 26 June 2015 at 16:45:45 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 06/26/2015 07:31 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>
>> Well, be aware that we don't officially support XP and haven't 
>> for a
>> while. Odds are, it'll work in most cases, but there may be
>> functionality in druntime or Phobos which relies on system 
>> calls added
>> to Windows in Vista. So, while you're obviously free to use an 
>> older
>> version of Windows if you want to, there's no guarantee that 
>> it'll work
>> with a current or future release of dmd/druntime/Phobos/etc., 
>> and we
>> won't fix it if it doesn't.
>>
>
> Considering that, according to that link Steven posted, XP 
> still has nearly 10x the desktop market share of even Linux 
> (1.57%? Can that even be right?)

Most of those XP users are folks who haven't bothered to update 
their computers because they continue to work and don't know 
enough to know how big a security problem it is. Linux has such a 
low market share, because we're talking about desktop here. It's 
primarily developers who use it for their desktop, not so much 
your average joe. In server land, on the other hand, it's pretty 
much king. So, the chart doesn't really saying anything about 
what is being used overall, just what's being used in desktops, 
and even then, it's just a slice what's actually going on, 
because they're getting those numbers from some specific set of 
sites and what they're seeing in user agent strings and not 
what's actually being used on the Internet overall. It's 
informative, but it only tells us part of the picture.

> I think that policy is quite premature and rooted more in 
> excuses rather than reason.

Anyone using an OS that isn't supported by the folks that wrote 
is going to have security problems - especially when we're 
talking about Windows - and it's suicidal to use it for anything 
serious. Companies don't generally sell software for defunct 
versions of Windows (even if some people are stubborn enough to 
continue to use them), and developers are generally the kinds of 
folks who won't be running an old, unsupported version of an OS  
for anything but hobby stuff anyway, so not supporting it with 
dmd/Phobos/etc. isn't generally going to screw over developers. 
The primary exception is developers who do not use Windows much 
and don't want to bother updating (as is Dejan's case). But 
anyone seriously developing for Windows (even as a secondary 
platform) can't afford to be doing so on a version which isn't 
even supported by MS, so I really don't think that that's much of 
an issue.

Regardless, this was debated some time ago, and we officially 
stopped supporting XP then (with Walter's approval). And IIRC 
(though I'd have to go digging to find the last discussion on 
it), we officially stopped support for XP even before MS dropped 
support for it. So, we're definitely not supporting it at this 
point - more than a year after MS stopped supporting it.

I think that the best policy (at least in the general case) is 
simply to support the versions that are supported by the folks 
who make the OS and no more. And even then, we might support 
fewer versions (e.g. IIRC, we don't support all of the versions 
of Mac OS X that Apple does due to issues with what the OS itself 
supported).

- Jonathan M Davis