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.
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
Perhaps the best example I can think of is the whole situation
InstallShield is....massive crapware and actually generated 16 bit installers way way after anyone was using 16bit PCs. Nobody notices until, I think it was W8 or W10 dropped support for running 16bit executables (something about dropping the subsystem that supported them.
Windows 11 drops IA32, and thus (first party) MS-DOS and Windows 3.x support.
Windows actually has some special cased support for (at least some of) the problematic 16 bit InstallShield installers to run a 32 bit version instead on AMD64.
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.
Tried to use Nim with VBCC to cross-compile to Amiga, but I failed. I think Nim does some pretty heavy assumptions about the C compiler that is used to compile the generated code.
I thought the entire point of Kotlin was to allow you to write in a more modern language, and then compile to older versions of Java no? I've not kept up with Kotlin much, but I would expect it to help a little.
I know uh FreePascal targets everything including the Gameboy. But then Pascal isn't super modern or sexy unfortunately.
In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets. For example we still have corona-style limitations like no paying with card if the country is bombed somewhere or the businessman risks to be fined. The thing is that nobody wants to buy something more expensive than Pentium 4 or Core2duo especially because most of accounting software still does not support multithreading. So we the businessmen use to mass-buy that cheap hardware, then we install W7 as a good enough OS with no irrigating/pesky/unneeded nanny notifications. The used motherboard if dies it makes no problem, it costs $10. Believe me, the 7 is a perfect OS for self-spying to our Governments and if you want to lobby Rust into this business you have to support W7 somehow.
In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets.
If that country happens to be Germany, it's to combat tax fraud.
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.
My dentist had a system running Windows XP for X-rays until 2 years ago.
The vendor stopped supporting it (they technically still did, but would dodge replacing parts, etc.) so I eventually fixed some minor issues for her which turned out to just be software related.
A key thing is that the machine was not network attached.
I can't speak for medical equipment, but lab equipment in testing labs (including the ones in hospitals) needs to be calibrated correctly and run exactly to the vendor's specifications. They will continue to sign off on old hardware they continue to support, even if it's actually a Pentium 3 running Windows 95 with the expensive lab device attached via the parallel port.
If you try and switch out the host computer to something newer, the software may or may not work, but you will definitely fail your audits for changing software without the vendor's approval.
For their part, the vendor supports you buying the new version of their device for a few million quid and it now runs via USB attached to a Windows 10 computer running their proprietary software.
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.
A more direct analogy is right there; your Phillips head screws cam out more easily than Torx. Everyone who wants screws that don't shred as easily moves to that weird 6 pointed star pattern, and your Phillips head screwdrivers are suddenly EOL'd.
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.
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.
Other than that, I think we’re all waiting for Josh Bloch to put out Effective Java 4th edition.
The main benefits of the post-8 world that I would look into learning are: pattern matching and destructuring, sealed (sum) types, records, and switch expressions.
In the library/framework space I think learning about quarkus, microprofile, and jakarta data would be valuable. It’s looking like that’s the future of Java on the server.
Less important things to learn about would probably be runtime changes like virtual threads, ZGC, or the AOT cache stuff coming out of project Leyden. Long term things to keep an eye on are value classes if we ever get them.
I meant it's not malicious compared to similar offerings. If anything, Microsoft has been extremely generous when it comes to support. Albeit not so much today (more on that later). It's a half-joke that the only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
You can have Linux and waste your time, and then stuff updates and Linux breaks. You can have MacOS and lock yourself into a padded Mac themed cell, for five years, then you have to upgrade or stuff will stop working (I'm on Intel Mac, less and less stuff works each day).
---
As for your question.
Short: Blame capitalism and its current setup.
Long: MSFT needs to beat the inflation; otherwise, it's falling behind. And because Windows is no longer growing, you can't really do anything other than rent extraction. It's reached saturation point, which means that money needs to be extracted in some other ways - via ads, via upselling (buy an Xbox 365 subscription), via selling data, etc.
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
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.
Author here -- previous discussions/blog posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313577
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37787161
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810782
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
Perhaps the best example I can think of is the whole situation
InstallShield is....massive crapware and actually generated 16 bit installers way way after anyone was using 16bit PCs. Nobody notices until, I think it was W8 or W10 dropped support for running 16bit executables (something about dropping the subsystem that supported them.
Nobody noticed because Windows special cased InstallShield.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20131031-00/?p=27...
It was 64-bit Windows versions, 16 bit was never supported not even on XP 64-bit. I think W8 was the first 64-bit only Windows.
Windows 11 drops IA32, and thus (first party) MS-DOS and Windows 3.x support.
Windows actually has some special cased support for (at least some of) the problematic 16 bit InstallShield installers to run a 32 bit version instead on AMD64.
Windows 11 was the first 64-bit only build of the NT-based Windows tree. There are 32-bit x86 builds of all previous versions.
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.
Tried to use Nim with VBCC to cross-compile to Amiga, but I failed. I think Nim does some pretty heavy assumptions about the C compiler that is used to compile the generated code.
Just in case you aren't in the loop, but there are gcc and llvm based Amiga cross compilers.
I thought the entire point of Kotlin was to allow you to write in a more modern language, and then compile to older versions of Java no? I've not kept up with Kotlin much, but I would expect it to help a little.
I know uh FreePascal targets everything including the Gameboy. But then Pascal isn't super modern or sexy unfortunately.
Why? That effort is far better spent on developing new things and taking advantage of modern hardware.
People need to upgrade. I'm surprised any machine running Vista could even use the modern web.
People do not, in fact, need to upgrade.
What kind of business are you in that you need to be able to support these platforms that have been end-of-life for quite some time? Genuine question.
In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets. For example we still have corona-style limitations like no paying with card if the country is bombed somewhere or the businessman risks to be fined. The thing is that nobody wants to buy something more expensive than Pentium 4 or Core2duo especially because most of accounting software still does not support multithreading. So we the businessmen use to mass-buy that cheap hardware, then we install W7 as a good enough OS with no irrigating/pesky/unneeded nanny notifications. The used motherboard if dies it makes no problem, it costs $10. Believe me, the 7 is a perfect OS for self-spying to our Governments and if you want to lobby Rust into this business you have to support W7 somehow.
In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets.
If that country happens to be Germany, it's to combat tax fraud.
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.
My dentist had a system running Windows XP for X-rays until 2 years ago.
The vendor stopped supporting it (they technically still did, but would dodge replacing parts, etc.) so I eventually fixed some minor issues for her which turned out to just be software related.
A key thing is that the machine was not network attached.
Not to be glib, but medical equipment in the first world is the same.
Surely it uses MSVCRT though.
I can't speak for medical equipment, but lab equipment in testing labs (including the ones in hospitals) needs to be calibrated correctly and run exactly to the vendor's specifications. They will continue to sign off on old hardware they continue to support, even if it's actually a Pentium 3 running Windows 95 with the expensive lab device attached via the parallel port.
If you try and switch out the host computer to something newer, the software may or may not work, but you will definitely fail your audits for changing software without the vendor's approval.
For their part, the vendor supports you buying the new version of their device for a few million quid and it now runs via USB attached to a Windows 10 computer running their proprietary software.
Since it took me a minute to realise... glib vs MSVCRT are the keywords to the joke.
Isn't Windows 8 even the same major version/generation of the OS, as the current versions?
Use Temurin Java 8 JDK/JRE. It's designed to be 1:1 compatible with Oracle Java.
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.
A more direct analogy is right there; your Phillips head screws cam out more easily than Torx. Everyone who wants screws that don't shred as easily moves to that weird 6 pointed star pattern, and your Phillips head screwdrivers are suddenly EOL'd.
Unlike buns, software doesn't deteriorate
It does, especially at the scale of operating systems.
Bugs and vulnerabilities are always being found, with fewer and fewer people in the pool that might even theoretically want to pay for fixing them.
Also, hardware does deteriorate, and the story is the same for adding software support for whatever is currently available in hardware.
> Bugs and vulnerabilities are always being found
none which haven't been there from the beginning
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.
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.
This is unpublished still but is worth checking out: https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-j...
Other than that, I think we’re all waiting for Josh Bloch to put out Effective Java 4th edition.
The main benefits of the post-8 world that I would look into learning are: pattern matching and destructuring, sealed (sum) types, records, and switch expressions.
In the library/framework space I think learning about quarkus, microprofile, and jakarta data would be valuable. It’s looking like that’s the future of Java on the server.
Less important things to learn about would probably be runtime changes like virtual threads, ZGC, or the AOT cache stuff coming out of project Leyden. Long term things to keep an eye on are value classes if we ever get them.
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).
So why the 20 years has no outcomed anything better than 7? The result is malicious.
Define better? I’d prefer modern Debian or Ubuntu over Windows 7 any day
I meant it's not malicious compared to similar offerings. If anything, Microsoft has been extremely generous when it comes to support. Albeit not so much today (more on that later). It's a half-joke that the only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
You can have Linux and waste your time, and then stuff updates and Linux breaks. You can have MacOS and lock yourself into a padded Mac themed cell, for five years, then you have to upgrade or stuff will stop working (I'm on Intel Mac, less and less stuff works each day).
---
As for your question.
Short: Blame capitalism and its current setup.
Long: MSFT needs to beat the inflation; otherwise, it's falling behind. And because Windows is no longer growing, you can't really do anything other than rent extraction. It's reached saturation point, which means that money needs to be extracted in some other ways - via ads, via upselling (buy an Xbox 365 subscription), via selling data, etc.
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.
And here I'm still trying to get an up-to.date Rust running on my outdated OS X (10.10). No luck (though I may not try hard enough).
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
Indeed. Though these days, some prefer older Windows as the new ones are abjectly worse, along all the axes they care about.
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...
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.
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.