Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
On Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:18:57 -0500, Walter Bright
<[email protected]> wrote:
Microsoft doesn't break support for older Windows when it comes out
with newer ones. Supporting the full range of Windows is essentially
trivial.
For the compiler, yes. For library code, not so much. If you want to
use newer features of the MS libraries, you must abandon support older
Windows.
True, but that's an app issue, not a dev tools issue.
One example: Tango's Process class tries to avoid popping up a console
window when running a script, but it uses a flag to CreateProcess that
is not supported on Windows 98 or earlier. The decision was made to
just simply not support Windows 98 or earlier because it wasn't worth
throwing out that feature simply to support users of Windows 98 (who
frankly, should retire their likely now-paperweights). This is probably
a milder case which causes no harm on a win98 box. However, calling a
new function would make the lib not compile or fail to run.
I don't see any problem with not going to extra effort to support Win9x.
I just see a problem with gratuitously breaking it.
