Comment by vbezhenar
13 hours ago
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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And how do you get paid when your users that are so broke they're still needlessly on 7/8?
Big assumption there... chances are they would rather keep the money or spend it elsewhere, instead of "unnecessarily" upgrading when things still work
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.
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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.
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
People do not, in fact, need to upgrade.
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.
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Unlike buns, software doesn't deteriorate
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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 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.
> Usually industries that stick to very old system did so because they didn't want to invest resources in the migration.
That can be the case, but there's also a lot of instance where it's not a matter of not wanting to invest, but that being stuck on an older system is the only option until a larger component also goes EOL or dies and cannot be repaired.
I see this all the time in manufacturing. User control interfaces that run on Windows XP or 2k. Machine is still great, can still get parts & repair it, but the software has long ago since stopped being supported. The manufacturer isn't going to spend 6 figures to replace a machine that hasn't fully depreciated yet.
In these instances, you just air gap it off and you're fine.
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.
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