RFC: Dropping Windows XP support

[Tamar Christina]

I don't think we should worry about windows server 2003. Unless I'm
mistaken the support Microsoft still provides is mostly maintenance.
The older version of GHC won't suddenly stop working on 2003, as such
all programs will continue to run just fine.

>From a development standpoint removing <= NT 5 support from would be
very beneficial. For those on the older platforms, they can use the
older GHCs, which I think is the policy most companies have taken
w.r.t. Xp/2003.

Regards,
TamarFrom: Gershom B
Sent: ‎08/‎11/‎2014 01:20
To: Austin Seipp; ghc-devs at haskell.org;
glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
Subject: Re: RFC: Dropping Windows XP support
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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> Glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
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>

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