Re: Windows emacs-25.1 i686 vs x86_64?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)
> Cc: rms@gnu.org,  eggert@cs.ucla.edu,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2016 16:50:24 +0000
> 
> > My main development machine runs Windows XP, so if you want to drop
> > support for it, you should ask me to resign first.
> 
> Yes, I remember you saying and I remain surprised that you use such an
> old operating system, and presumably computer. I guess we wait till your
> machine breaks before we move to XP.

My machine is just 4-year old, so it is unlikely to break any time
soon (barring force majeure).

> > Btw, there are 2 versions of Windows between 9X and XP, which we still
> > support, and you didn't mention.
> 
> Good point, I had forgotten, my memory of those times is hazy.

FWIW, I think considering deprecation of XP, or any other of the OS
versions from the NT family, is unjustified, because, unlike Windows
9X, the number of features that Emacs needs missing from those older
NT-family versions is very small, while all the significant features
we want -- Unicode APIs, file security and access control, Uniscribe
complex script shaping, etc. -- are present in all of those versions.
So removing support for these versions will require some non-trivial
amount of work, and will risk introducing bugs, while the gains will
be insignificant to non-existent.  By contrast, testing for
availability of a function is just a few boilerplate lines of code.
It really isn't worth the hassle.