On 22/01/2012 23:48, Jonathan M Davis wrote: <snip>
It would be insane to not support XP at this point. Not only does XP still support it, but there are tons of people who have refused to move on. IIRC, Microsoft was effectively forced to support it longer because of the number of people (particularly companies) who refused to upgrade. However, I see no reason to support anything older than XP.
<snip>
Principle of least surprise. Somebody compiling for a given target platform should expect whether it runs on a given version of the platform to be down to the APIs the program uses, not the language the program is written in.
Moreover, it seems a lot of currently maintained software still claims to support Win2000 - Firefox and OpenOffice for instance. For a whole programming language, the majority of whose users will be writing much simpler programs than this, to have higher system requirements than this seems absurd.
Stewart.
