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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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’ve myself compiled Nim on Windows 7, Windows XP, and Haiku, and have run simple Nim programs on the C64 and GameBoy Advance.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/mrk-its/rust-mos
It works, and builds binaries that are ready to be executed by Vice emulator.
3.11, Win32s (so still using 32-bit, not 16-bit code.)
Just because you’re targeting windows xp doesn’t mean you need to run windows xp to do development.