I wish more languages support old platforms. I'm working in a company and a lot of our customers are running Windows 7 and 8, few of them running Vista. I have to use ancient versions of development tools to target those. For example stuck on Java 8 for eternity. It's PITA.
The problem is, as usual, that some people want that support, but nobody is actually interested in helping out with that support - and that doesn't only include people willing to help out with the code, it includes things like CI. Just how the riscv targets won't be able to reach tier 1 without GH or someone else offering CI support.
Rust's target tiers, while historically not as enforced as they are today, have requirements attached to them that each target has to fulfill; demoting a target or removing support isn't done for fun, but because of what the reality reflects. In Windows 7's case, support from the Tier 1 Windows target was not so much removed as it was acknowledged that the support guaranteees just didn't exist - host tools had long been dead with LLVM having removed support for running on Windows 7, and tier 1 support wasn't guaranteed without any CI to test it on. Thus support was removed, and very soon contributors popped up to maintain the win7 target which is tier 3 and accurately reflects the support gurantees of that target.
(Not a jab at your situation btw, and I wish I could offer you a solution beyond the win7 target - but as it's essentially the preexisting Windows 7 support extracted into a target that matched its reality, it works quite well in practice)
I do wonder how much support is removed because of genuine maintenance or compatibility burden, because I've encountered enough examples where it was done solely because some target was deemed "too old" arbitrarily, even if it would still work without any modifications.
> even if it would still work without any modifications
even in this case, maintenance burden is still real. supporting the old target often prevents you from using features/tools that make maintenance easier
Languages that compile to C (e.g. Nim) are great on older systems. If a system has a working C compiler (or cross-compiler), there’s a good chance that it’ll just work.
I’ve myself compiled Nim on Windows 7, Windows XP, and Haiku, and have run simple Nim programs on the C64 and GameBoy Advance.
seeing Windows 8 called old really did some psychic damage to me. If it's not a secret, what kind of customers do you have? Is it some industrial stuff as usual?
Medicine. I'm living in third world country and probably they don't have enough money to upgrade often, they just install something and work with it for many years. Works for them, I guess, I often see computers with 2-4 GB RAM and some ancient Celeron.
I’m a huge Java fan, modern versions are amazing, but being stuck on 8 is the only time I’d recommend just using Kotlin or Scala and compiling to v8 byte code. 8 is just a miserable experience.
It's not hard to do either, especially on Windows where backwards-compatibility is almost completely guaranteed.
Of course those in the planned obsolescence mindset would fight hard against it, because then it would be harder for us to take the good without the bad.
I think it's more like your gen1 wi-fi enabled Philips screwdriver stops working because it's EOL as opposed to because nobody uses Philps screws anymore. Sometimes it's the latter, but not always.
The question is how much are people willing to pay for this trouble. Usually industries that stick to very old system did so because they didn't want to invest resources in the migration.
An interesting bit of history: for a long time Rust maintained first party support for Windows XP, after other parts of ecosystem generally gave up. This was because Firefox needed it.
Rust has 3 "platform support" tiers (effectively - guaranteed to work, guaranteed to build, supposed to work). However, these are (obviously) defined only for some of the target triples. This project defines "Tier-4" (which is normally not a thing) unstable support for Windows Vista-and-prior
tiers 1-3 are policies[0] for in-tree targets, so by saying tier 4 they mean one implemented in a fork. Though that kind of skips over targets that can get away with just a custom target spec[1] and not modifying the source.
In my mind the most common cases of people running ancient operating systems are computers in control of hardware. Plenty of hardware lasts much longer than 30 years, consequently there's still stuff out there that shipped with Windows 95 and never got new drivers. If you want new software for that environment Rust sounds like a great choice
I wish more languages support old platforms. I'm working in a company and a lot of our customers are running Windows 7 and 8, few of them running Vista. I have to use ancient versions of development tools to target those. For example stuck on Java 8 for eternity. It's PITA.
The problem is, as usual, that some people want that support, but nobody is actually interested in helping out with that support - and that doesn't only include people willing to help out with the code, it includes things like CI. Just how the riscv targets won't be able to reach tier 1 without GH or someone else offering CI support.
Rust's target tiers, while historically not as enforced as they are today, have requirements attached to them that each target has to fulfill; demoting a target or removing support isn't done for fun, but because of what the reality reflects. In Windows 7's case, support from the Tier 1 Windows target was not so much removed as it was acknowledged that the support guaranteees just didn't exist - host tools had long been dead with LLVM having removed support for running on Windows 7, and tier 1 support wasn't guaranteed without any CI to test it on. Thus support was removed, and very soon contributors popped up to maintain the win7 target which is tier 3 and accurately reflects the support gurantees of that target.
(Not a jab at your situation btw, and I wish I could offer you a solution beyond the win7 target - but as it's essentially the preexisting Windows 7 support extracted into a target that matched its reality, it works quite well in practice)
I do wonder how much support is removed because of genuine maintenance or compatibility burden, because I've encountered enough examples where it was done solely because some target was deemed "too old" arbitrarily, even if it would still work without any modifications.
> even if it would still work without any modifications
even in this case, maintenance burden is still real. supporting the old target often prevents you from using features/tools that make maintenance easier
Languages that compile to C (e.g. Nim) are great on older systems. If a system has a working C compiler (or cross-compiler), there’s a good chance that it’ll just work.
I’ve myself compiled Nim on Windows 7, Windows XP, and Haiku, and have run simple Nim programs on the C64 and GameBoy Advance.
seeing Windows 8 called old really did some psychic damage to me. If it's not a secret, what kind of customers do you have? Is it some industrial stuff as usual?
Isn't Windows 8 even the same major version/generation of the OS, as the current versions?
Medicine. I'm living in third world country and probably they don't have enough money to upgrade often, they just install something and work with it for many years. Works for them, I guess, I often see computers with 2-4 GB RAM and some ancient Celeron.
Not to be glib, but medical equipment in the first world is the same.
Surely it uses MSVCRT though.
Use Temurin Java 8 JDK/JRE. It's designed to be 1:1 compatible with Oracle Java.
I’m a huge Java fan, modern versions are amazing, but being stuck on 8 is the only time I’d recommend just using Kotlin or Scala and compiling to v8 byte code. 8 is just a miserable experience.
Do you happen to know some good learning resources (books, etc.) for modern Java versions?
My last job used Java 8 exclusively and it was indeed a miserable experience, but I am contemplating using modern java for my next project.
The way some language runtimes have dropped support for Windows 7 feels outright malicious.
Malicious? Thats a heavy accusation.
Malicious? It's almost 20 years old (it will be in 2029).
It's not hard to do either, especially on Windows where backwards-compatibility is almost completely guaranteed.
Of course those in the planned obsolescence mindset would fight hard against it, because then it would be harder for us to take the good without the bad.
I really hate my bakery, the buns are only edible for some days, after that, they grow mold!
Without sarcasm, it is entirely reasonable that when the OS is EOL by the 1st party, software support for it by 3rd party also ends soon after that.
I think it's more like your gen1 wi-fi enabled Philips screwdriver stops working because it's EOL as opposed to because nobody uses Philps screws anymore. Sometimes it's the latter, but not always.
The question is how much are people willing to pay for this trouble. Usually industries that stick to very old system did so because they didn't want to invest resources in the migration.
An interesting bit of history: for a long time Rust maintained first party support for Windows XP, after other parts of ecosystem generally gave up. This was because Firefox needed it.
https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/378 (major change proposal to drop Windows XP support) notes this history and links to other relevant pages.
For someone who is not a rust programmer, but would like to keep up to date, can somebody tell me what "Tier 4" is. And why must it be quoted?
Rust has 3 "platform support" tiers (effectively - guaranteed to work, guaranteed to build, supposed to work). However, these are (obviously) defined only for some of the target triples. This project defines "Tier-4" (which is normally not a thing) unstable support for Windows Vista-and-prior
tiers 1-3 are policies[0] for in-tree targets, so by saying tier 4 they mean one implemented in a fork. Though that kind of skips over targets that can get away with just a custom target spec[1] and not modifying the source.
[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/rustc/target-tier-policy.html [1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/targets/custom.html
Tier 3 is max official
This target might become more viable in the future as Stable Rust adds options to rebuild libstd with custom features as part of building a project.
And unofficial "Tier 5" Rust Target is... for Commodore-64:
https://github.com/mrk-its/rust-mos
It works, and builds binaries that are ready to be executed by Vice emulator.
I think this is valueable for efforts like Reactos.
The idea of running Rust code on Windows 95 is very funny to me. Two completely different universes colliding.
In my mind the most common cases of people running ancient operating systems are computers in control of hardware. Plenty of hardware lasts much longer than 30 years, consequently there's still stuff out there that shipped with Windows 95 and never got new drivers. If you want new software for that environment Rust sounds like a great choice
IIRC, somebody ran .NET on Windows 3.1.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010159
3.11, Win32s (so still using 32-bit, not 16-bit code.)
Yes, that one!
The reverse of that is running 16bit Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x apps on 64bit Windows 10/11 https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
I think it was Windows 95: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUMNtKQLl8
considering the all-insistence of rust on using internet for all the libraries, this doesn't seem like a good idea...
With cargo --offline, Rust has better than average support for offline build.
What insistence? I do 99% of my Rust development with this ~/.cargo/config.toml:
Works great.What do you mean? Cargo downloads packages from the internet by default programs do exactly what they’re programmed to do. No more and no less.
Just because you’re targeting windows xp doesn’t mean you need to run windows xp to do development.