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

On 27/06/2015 4:09 a.m., Dicebot wrote:
> Judging purely by feature set, Win 10 looks first Windows ever which
> will actually be usable for work. At least it will have multiple
> desktops

Fun fact: WinAPI has pretty much always supported multiple desktops. The UI just didn't support changing desktops.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881

 and primitive package management. And no, Windows XP was not
> usable by any means.

Windows has had package management since Win95, it just wasn't exposed for us mere mortals unfortunately.

> It isn't a good enough reason to switch back to Windows though :)

On 26 June 2015 at 09:29, Iain Buclaw <ibuclaw@gdcproject.org> wrote:
>
> On 26 Jun 2015 09:28, "Iain Buclaw" <ibuclaw@gdcproject.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 25 Jun 2015 12:16, "ponce via Digitalmars-d" <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Wednesday, 24 June 2015 at 16:10:44 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows-server-2003/
>> >>
>> >> Which means that (strictly speaking), in 3 weeks time, there will be *no* operating system that supports CodeView debugging.
>> >>
>> >> This is an elongated way of asking
>> >>
>> >> "Can I remove -gc yet?"
>> >>
>> >> But as I'm not a Windows user, I'll have to ask how you guys deal with debugging, and if you still rely on CV being emitted from DMD, you must hurry up to implement an alternative!
>> >>
>> >> Iain.
>> >
>> >
>> > Can't speak for all Windows users, but I think we mostly let cv2pdb convert CV into something other tools understand.
>>
>> That is not a good solution.  There's compiler should speak the tool's language.
>
> Also, does cv2pdb support converting D specific CV symbols?

Ping, is there any program that understands these symbols?

http://dlang.org/abi.html#codeview

Ddbg is a dead link, and all I can find is a dead 'Ddbg successor' on Dsource.

On Saturday, 27 June 2015 at 06:39:18 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>> Also, does cv2pdb support converting D specific CV symbols?
>
> Ping, is there any program that understands these symbols?
>
> http://dlang.org/abi.html#codeview
>
> Ddbg is a dead link, and all I can find is a dead 'Ddbg successor' on Dsource.

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11368
I suppose it's mostly visuald folks, who use it that way, try to ask them.

On 27/06/15 03:35, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> 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).

I'm not exactly sure which version we officially support but I'm pretty sure it works on 10.6. I think Apple itself only supports the current version and the previous version, that would be 10.10 and 10.9. Soon it will be 10.11 and 10.10.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Saturday, 27 June 2015 at 20:35:02 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 27/06/15 03:35, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>
>> 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).
>
> I'm not exactly sure which version we officially support but I'm pretty sure it works on 10.6. I think Apple itself only supports the current version and the previous version, that would be 10.10 and 10.9. Soon it will be 10.11 and 10.10.

I thought that 10.6 was the one that we dropped support for because it didn't support TLS or something like that. I don't know. I don't pay much attention to Apple, and clearly, I'm not remembering that status of Mac OS X stuff very well. For the most part though, we haven't been very clear about what versions we support of OSes, and I think that it's really only come up previously when there are features that we want to use in new OSes that old OSes don't support. I think that Win2K, XP, and whatever version of Mac OS X that we dropped explicitly support for previously are the only ones where we've been very explicit about it though.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 28/06/15 00:25, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> I thought that 10.6 was the one that we dropped support for because it
> didn't support TLS or something like that.

That's true, only 10.7 and later supports TLS. But we're still using emulated TLS, so it doesn't matter. LDC, which is using native TLS, only supports 10.7 and later.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg