"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.716.1327278278.16222.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > On Monday, January 23, 2012 00:14:27 Stewart Gordon wrote: >> 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. > > Except that druntime and Phobos use those APIs. So, it matters. And since > the > number of people using pre-Win2K is extremely low, I see that as a > complete > non-issue. > >> 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. > > As I said in my previous post, while ideally we'd say that we don't > support > anything older than WinXP, saying that we support Win2K probably costs us > nothing. It's the pre-Win2K that's the problem with the lack of W > functions > and the like. > > The next version of Windows beyond that that it would be useful to be able > to > say that we don't support anything older than is Vista. I would _love_ to > be > able to do that Vista is the oldest that we support, because Vista added a > bunch of useful API calls and the like. But we obviously can't do that > anytime > soon. The user base for XP is huge. The same can't be said of pre-Win2K. > > So, I really think that we should say that we don't support pre-Win2K, and > I'd > like to say that we don't support pre-XP, but I don't think that it hurts > us > any to say that we support Win2K. >
I agree on all points. But you know, the really bizarre thing is, *all* MS has to do to win over all the XP people (or at least the majority of them) is two simple things: 1. *Allow* people to use the XP UI (and no, I don't mean Luna). It's that simple: Just *quit* making UI changes mandatory (a lesson Mozilla could stand to learn, too, especially since they allegedly care so much about configurability). 2. Ditch the AV-crippling and driver-revocation bullshit. That's it. That's all they have to do. The core of Win7 is basically solid (from what I hear). But they can't handle that, can they? Talk about digging one's own grave. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Vista and Win7 (and Win8) have not only caused people to stick with XP, but also caused a lot of Win->Lin converts - I'm getting closer and closer to that myself. All they (or Mozilla) seem to care about anymore is just fucking around with the UI everyone already liked - and redoing it over, and over, and over.
