Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

Denis Shelomovskij verylonglogin.reg at gmail.com
Sun Jan 22 11:55:58 PST 2012


In this thread I would like a reason of trying to support Win95/98/Me to 
be discussed. I would like to see arguments for and against and, when 
there will be enough arguments, to vote, make a decision, and add 
supported Windows OS-es list to the docs, because now D is stamping 
itself by having undefined behaviour on Windows: one just can't tell, 
what will program in D do on certain version of Windows: crash/partially 
works/works?

My reasons against trying to support Win95/98/Me in D2:
* In Russia we have lots of outdated PC-s, and according to statistics 
of visitors of one site with educational thematics Win95+Win98+Me / All 
Windows visitors is 3+5+2 = 10 / 9_925 ~ 0.1%.
* If trying to support Win95/98/Me will be discarded, we can remove:
     1. `std.__fileinit`
     2. lots of small code duplicates like `useWfuncs ? WinFuncW() : 
WinFuncA()`
     3. some more complicated stuff like `SelUni` template in 
`std.windows.registry` or Windows `getcwd` implementation in `std.file`
* Developers will not be forced to create things that was enumerated in 
previous paragraph and fill themselves doing ungrateful work, because:
     1. Even command line arguments has never been implemented for 
Win95/98/Me in druntime (at least according to Git history of 
`rt.dmain2`, Issue 5926)
     2. For more than 8 months even Windows 2000 isn't supported at all 
(every D2 program crashes since 2.053, Issue 6024).
* This rejection isn't a breaking change because Win95/98/Me has never 
been supported by D2 (see previous paragraph).
* This rejection will allow to just add supported Windows OS-es list to 
the docs by claiming Win95/98/Me as unsupported.


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