RFC: Dropping Windows XP support

[David Feuer]

+1. Windows XP was Microsoft's most successful OS thus far, but it's pretty
much dead now. One potentially related potential concern: how will this
change affect Wine support?

On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This is a quick discussion about the current system requirements for
> Windows builds.
>
> Spurred by a recent[1] LLVM discussion, I'd like to raise the question
> of dropping support for Windows XP, and bumping the minimum required
> version to Windows Vista or even Windows 7.
>
> For one, Microsoft doesn't support XP anymore, so most people are
> moving off it anyway. 'Soon' even XP Embedded will be obsoleted.
>
> But second, Vista and beyond introduced useful new APIs we could use.
> I was digging through the LLVM thread and two came out to me:
>
>  1) We could switch to using slim reader/writer locks, which in some
> workloads may work out better than critical sections (they'll win on
> more read-heavy workloads). The downsides is there's no recursive
> locking but we don't use that anyway (and recursive locks are
> considered bad by many anyway[2]).
>
>  2) We could probably use an actual condition variables API that was
> introduced with Vista. Currently we use a giant EVENT object to
> emulate the API, which could be replaced with the real deal.
>
> Both of these could be nice wins for simplicity and performance I think.
>
> I know there are some corporate users out there who this may impact,
> and users as well. I'd like to know what people think. Particularly
> what version we should standardize on.
>
> FWIW, I don't plan on changing any of this until the 7.12 release at least.
>
> [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/78419
> [2] http://www.zaval.org/resources/library/butenhof1.html
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
> Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
> Glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20141107/b42a58dd/attachment-0001.html>