RFC: Dropping Windows XP support

Gershom B gershomb at gmail.com
Sat Nov 8 00:19:59 UTC 2014


One concern here is that even with XP falling out of support, Windows Server 2003 remains supported through July 2015, and so we should give it a little chunk of time after that falls out of support from Microsoft before we stop supporting that. I think the limitations in Server 2003 are roughly the same as XP.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows-server-2003/

However, the next Windows Server (2008) should share all Vista features.

Cheers,
Gershom


On November 7, 2014 at 1:16:39 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/
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