Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
61–70 of 97 posts
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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).
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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.
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wan…
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.
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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...
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#65I 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.
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.
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wan…
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.
Germany still does not generally require this. It's required if you use an electronic cash register (and only since recently), but if you don't, it's perfectly legal to just tally the money with pen and paper at the end of the business day. It's how all the small fast food restaurants do tax evasion: just scribble half of what you actually sold on the back of a napkin, and that's enough "proof" for the tax authorities.
The current governing coalition has come to an agreement that electronic cash registers will be mandatory starting in 2027, but that law hasn't been passed yet.
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#69Shameless plug: Some of my hobby projects written in C (e.g. https://github.com/pts/bakefat) can be built reproducibly for Linux >=1.0 (1994), FreeBSD (same ELF executable program file as for Linux) and Win32 working on all versions of Windows (Windows NT 3.1 (1993)--Windows 11). The C compiler (running on Linux i386 and amd64 host) used for the release build is self-contained and included in the project, along with the libc.
Doing such backward compatibility is definitiely possible for command-line tools. Once set up, it's automatic, and it needs extra testing after major changes.
Re: Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
#70I 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.
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.
The only things really driving upgrades are gaming and web browsing. If you dont need to do either of those, you could probably get by with windows 9x