What is the FreeBSD situation?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, November 04, 2017 01:30:12 Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On 11/3/2017 5:29 AM, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
> >> Note that dmd still runs on Windows XP, though it is not officially
> >> supported. You just need to be careful about using TLS variables on it
> >> :-(
> >
> > to avoid spreading this false information: TLS in D works in dynamically
> > loaded DLLs on WinXP since 2010.
>
> The fact that we haven't officially tested that it works for years means
> be careful about attesting that it does work.
>
> Even simple DLL support in Windows keeps breaking because it is not part
> of the autotester test suite.

Just the other day, a fix for std.experimental.allocator that was supposed
to fix FreeBSD 10.x/11.x fixed 32-bit but broke 64-bit - and it had no
effect on FreeBSD 8.4 or whatever it is that's running on the main
autotester FreeBSD boxes. The problem was caught and fixed, but for any
given platform, unless we're running it as part of the autotester, or
someone runs the tests locally and reports any breakages that occur, it's
trivial for bugs to creep in, as annoying as that is.

As such, I don't think that the odds are good at all that running modern D
programs on Windows XP is going to work correctly in general. I don't expect
that it's completely broken, but I sure wouldn't trust it without running
the complete test suite in XP to verify whatever version of dmd, druntime,
and Phobos you're trying to use - and I think that we may even be using some
Windows API calls in Phobos which were introduced in Vista, since a lot of
improved API calls were added in Vista, and it's certainly the case that
_those_ won't work in XP.

I confess that I have little sympathy if D doesn't work in XP though given
that the fact that Microsoft doesn't support it anymore makes it completely
unsafe to run unless it's not connected to the Internet.

- Jonathan M Davis