23 comments

  • enoent 5 days ago ago

    Nice, also check these projects that target earlier versions:

    * Rust9x: Compile Rust code for Windows 95, NT and above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273

    * Rust on MIPS64 Windows NT 4.0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29240174

  • password4321 2 days ago ago

    Can anyone point me to how to build Rust programs on no-longer-supported Intel MacOS versions (edit: eg. v10.12, looks like that's the current cutoff for tier 2)?

    I also wanted zig for ncdu2.

    I admit I haven't looked too hard, macports has most of what I need still covered. It's always a sad day on my older hardware when I don't have brew auto-update disabled and a MacOS version goes out of support.

    • necubi 2 days ago ago

      Rust still supports Intel Macs just fine. The x86_64-apple-darwin target was recently downgraded to tier 2, which just means that some automated tests will no longer run as part of the standard dev cycle.

  • pnathan 2 days ago ago

    I wonder what it would take to compile rust programs to run on Win 3.1. I don't know why you would, but, I wonder.

    • jcranmer 2 days ago ago

      With Windows 3.1, you're probably talking about having to compile to the Win16 interface, which would be a bit of a challenge.

      LLVM's x86 backend doesn't really support 16-bit compilation (the best it gets to is supporting 32-bit in a 16-bit code segment). There's also no support for the Win16-based object file formats. So you'd probably be best off creating your own entirely new backend for a Win16 environment... which probably is easier than you'd think, given that you could ignore anything more complicated than the actual Intel 386 or 486 ISA. (I've actually started sketching out what the IR for such a backend would look like, mostly in terms of LLVM address space mappings).

      Win16 is also kind of hard to target for Rust because it's a segmented memory model, and Rust's pointer model doesn't really cope with that well--it only supports one pointer type, and also requires that sizeof(ptr) == sizeof(usize) which is questionable for far pointers. If you're writing your own backend, you could just map everything to huge pointers at the programmer level and have optimization passes that convert them down to far or near pointers if sufficient.

      Or you could stuff all of that, and just make a 32-bit app and wrap it in a shell loader that thunks all of the OS calls to 16-bit calls and vice-versa.

      • pjmlp 2 days ago ago

        Maybe it could be half way there with Win32s.

    • seritools 2 days ago ago

      likely no_std, and running via Win32s. Rust doesn't have support for segmented memory, so native 16-bit would be much harder

  • dijit 2 days ago ago

    And there's me stupdily thinking that as long as you have a compatible MSVC or LLVM backend that it would work.

    Shows how little I know. :(

    • seritools 2 days ago ago

      it would, just without standard library support, as the default stdlib imports system APIs that older versions don't provide. Other than those and a "supported OS version" filed in the PE header there isn't really much else in your way (hence my Rust9x project)

      • BirAdam 2 days ago ago

        I thought win16 only supported NE and MZ, does it support PE?

        • seritools 2 days ago ago

          this comment thread hasn't been talking about win16.

          but you're right, win16 can only load some 32-bit PE files through something like Win32s

  • internet_points 2 days ago ago

    does it have anything to do with yet-to-be-evaluated functions?

  • andrewshadura 2 days ago ago

    Thanks, thunks. Thunks!

  • dmitrygr 2 days ago ago

    Wait till you hear how to build c programs for windows vista,xp,98,3.1: just click “build” in Visual studio 6.

    • jcranmer 2 days ago ago

      MSVC appears to have dropped support for Windows 3.1 in 2003 and Windows 9x in 2008. It might still be able to generate support for Windows XP and Vista if you scrounge up an appropriate SDK, but the default CRT it builds with sure doesn't support those platforms.

      • dmitrygr 2 days ago ago

        VS6 supports them all and results run on win11 as well. ISO is on archive.org, serial number is 111-1111111

        enjoy