Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions (github.com)

The idea of running Rust code on Windows 95 is very funny to me. Two completely different universes colliding.

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.

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.

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.

considering the all-insistence of rust on using internet for all the libraries, this doesn't seem like a good idea...

I think this is valueable for efforts like Reactos.

And unofficial "Tier 5" Rust Target is... for Commodore-64:

https://github.com/mrk-its/rust-mos

It works, and builds binaries that are ready to be executed by Vice emulator.

This target might become more viable in the future as Stable Rust adds options to rebuild libstd with custom features as part of building a project.

For someone who is not a rust programmer, but would like to keep up to date, can somebody tell me what "Tier 4" is. And why must it be quoted?

And here I'm still trying to get an up-to.date Rust running on my outdated OS X (10.10). No luck (though I may not try hard enough).

Author here -- previous discussions/blog posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313577

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37787161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810782

Shameless 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.

MinC for XP and up: (MinC is not Cygwin, you get cc, ncurses, ksh, git and some goodies).

https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html

IronTCL for XP and up

https://minc.commandlinerevolution.nl/english/home.html

Updated SSL/TLS certs, again for XP and beyond:

https://legacyupdate.net/

Tiny Pascal-like language targetting DOS, CP/M and Unix:

https://t3x.org/t3x/0/index.html It's no Free Pascal but it can do good stuff with very little:

https://t3x.org/t3x/0/programs.html

JimTCL, a tiny TCL with bundled TLS, JSON, Sqlite3 and, optionally, some SDL2 support:

https://github.com/msteveb/jimtcl https://jim.tcl-lang.org/home/doc/www/www/index.html

You can compile JimTCL with MinC under XP, and maybe T3X0 too. With JimTCL you can build a quick TCL expect clone, some netcat clone too with TLS can be done in minutes too, really good for debugging or to create a simple IRC/Email/Gopher/Gemini client in text mode.

Can it manage Win32s?