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

[Reid Kleckner]

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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