[LLVMdev] RFC: Drop support running LLVM on Windows XP (original) (raw)

Aaron Ballman aaron at aaronballman.com
Thu Oct 30 13:39:18 PDT 2014

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 4:29 PM, Reid Kleckner <rnk at google.com> 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.

I am in favor of this switch, assuming there are no strong objections.

~Aaron

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