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

[Aaron Ballman]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 6:26 PM, Reid Kleckner <rnk at google.com> wrote:
> Nobody objected to raising the bar, so I think we can go ahead and do this.
> Keeping the XP support until 3.7 ships seems reasonable as it's less
> disruptive.

Agreed.

> Should we consider bypassing Vista and jumping to 7 as the lowest supported
> Windows version as David suggested? I think we should document 7 as the
> recommended baseline. After we start using some of the newer APIs, we can
> see if users complain and evaluate the burden of maintaining Vista support
> at that time.

I think it's reasonable to switch to Windows 7 at this point. Vista's
mainstream support ended in 2012 and only has extended support until
2017, so it's sunsetting already.

~Aaron

>
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 2:28 PM, Greg Bedwell <gregbedwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> It looks like this conversation stalled.  I have a local patch that I'd
>> like to send upstream (automatically generating Windows crash dumps on
>> clang/LLVM crashes) that makes use of a Windows API function that requires
>> _WIN32_WINNT set to 0x0600 at minimum so I'd like to restart the
>> conversation!
>>
>> As there have so far been no objections that I've seen and we're branching
>> imminently, it feels like a perfect time to make this change as soon as the
>> release branch is taken, and adding a release note for 3.7 to the effect of
>> it being the final version supporting XP.  I don't think there's been a
>> clear conclusion on what we should raise it to though.
>>
>> Any thoughts on this?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -Greg
>>
>>
>> On 31 October 2014 at 16:30, Robinson, Paul
>> <Paul_Robinson at playstation.sony.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> We formally support our toolchain only on Windows 7 onward, so it's okay
>>> with us.
>>>
>>> (Please make sure this goes in the release notes when you start doing
>>> something not supported in XP and/or Vista.)
>>>
>>> --paulr
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On
>>> Behalf Of Jim Rowan
>>> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 1:05 PM
>>> To: Reid Kleckner
>>> Cc: LLVM Developers Mailing List
>>> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] RFC: Drop support running LLVM on Windows XP
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> +1
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Oct 30, 2014, at 3:29 PM, Reid Kleckner wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 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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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>> by the Linux Foundation
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>
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