[LLVMdev] RFC: Drop support running LLVM on Windows XP

[Mueller-Roemer, Johannes Sebastian]

As long as the new APIs are also supported on current MinGW-w64 compilers, I am for this switch.

--
Johannes S. Mueller-Roemer, MSc
Wiss. Mitarbeiter - Interactive Engineering Technologies (IET)

Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD
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From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Reid Kleckner
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2014 21:30
To: LLVM Developers Mailing List
Subject: [LLVMdev] RFC: Drop support running LLVM on Windows XP

I'd like to raise our baseline Windows system requirements to Vista, dropping support for running LLVM on Windows XP. Microsoft dropped support for XP half a year ago in April 2014.

Our current status is that we require VS 2012 to build LLVM, and VS 2012 only runs on Vista+, but it has the ability produce binaries that run on XP. During the C++11-pocalypse, users expressed interest in keeping this working. I'm proposing that we drop support for this.

Vista introduced a lot of handy system APIs that could significantly simplify LLVM's Support library. For example, I'd really like to use the blessed one-time initialization routines in this CL:
http://reviews.llvm.org/D5922

Vista also introduced a bunch of condition variable APIs that I know less about, but that's another reason we might want to raise our base requirement as people look into parallel LTO and codegen. It also seems likely that we will want to use some of the new C++11 library features that are only present in newer CRTs, which don't run on XP.

Please respond if you have any objections. If there are no strong objections, I think we can start using Vista+ APIs in a week or so. We can still change our minds and revert stuff before the release if users feel this is too short notice.
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