[0] https://www.mypal-browser.org/ [1] https://github.com/DiscordMessenger/dm
Not to mention bloat: I have a keyboard with a dedicated calculator button. On a machine with Core i5 something or other and SSD it takes about 2 seconds for the calculator to appear the first time I push that button. On the Core 2 Duo machine that preceded it, running XP from spinning rust, the calculator would appear instantly - certainly before I can release the button.
But also WinXP was the OS a lot of people used during their formative years - don't underestimate the power of nostalgia.
Also, for some people the very fact that Microsoft don't want you to would be reason enough!
Personally if I were into preserving old Windows versions I'd be putting my effort into Win2k SP4, since it's the last version that doesn't need activating. (I did have to activate a Vista install recently - just a VM used to keep alive some legacy software whose own activation servers are but a distant memory. It's still possible, but you can't do it over the phone any more, and I couldn't find any way to do it without registering a Microsoft account.)
I'm not a part of the Windows XP community, but I've gotten close. I love that I can make it look just like Windows 2000 and that I know where all the little knobs and dials are. I can get a Windows XP installation configured to be exactly as I want it to be very quickly and I know it won't suddenly change on me.
So I'm thinking of putting an XP install back on the thing with my licenced MS Office 2000 and a few other bits and pieces of software just for retro fun, and a reminder about how things were 20 years or so ago to avoid the rose tinted glasses effect.
For me, it's knowing what I know now, what could I've done back 25 (wow!) years ago. It's a fun exercise.
I stopped using Windows at work as Win7 was rolling out but got another job using it again as Win11 started rolling out. Having missed out on the slow decline, it's very obvious to me how much better the older Windows were. The new ones have a dumpster fire UI with built-in advertising that shoves Microsoft web crap and AI down your throat at every chance.
[1] https://msfn.org/board/topic/185966-my-browser-builds-part-5...
And to my surprise, the latest 32-bit release of Nim simply works out the box. But Nim compiles to C, so I also needed C compiler. Many versions of mingw I could find online - they all failed to launch.
After some time I managed to find very old Mingw (gcc 4.7.1) that have finally worked [1].
[0] - https://nim-lang.org/
[1] - https://ibb.co/TBdvZPVt
gopher://texto-plano.xyz:70/1/~anthk/bfgxp
Unzip the file and launch "lanzar.bat" in order to test it. I think I added tcllib and tklib just in case, so you can do a lot with that interpreter.
then run (something like) this:
clang-cl /winsysroot:"" /DWINVER=0x0400 /D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0400 -m32 /GS- -march=i586 -Wno-nonportable-include-path /imsvc"C:\MSVC6\VC98\Include" hello.c -fuse-ld=lld-link /link /SAFESEH:NO /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS,4.0 /LIBPATH:"C:\MSVC6\VC98\Lib" user32.lib kernel32.lib msvcrt.lib
Going back to win7 is just a neurological pathogen level of stockholm syndrome. give your head a shake.
This was interesting!
AHK came in very handy we needed a quick tool to track mill operators, roughly 20-30 lines of code and we had a working GUI app.
These machines are likely to live at least another 10-15 years and even the brand new ones being sold today uses Windows 7.
Modern languages and frameworks proceed and leave these old systems behind, but everything from our infrastructure to manufacturing capacity that exists runs on legacy systems, not modern computers. The cost of replacing the computers is usually more than the machine itself.
Or you could install and old copy of Cygwin or MinGW.
Do you want to run a modern Visual Studio and target XP? Maybe you can make that work if you install an old platform SDK and set WINVER and _WIN32_VERSION and work around all the warnings and compatibility problems that you'll run into. It is fighting an uphill battle and it will continue to get worse with each new version of VS that you want use.
For rust there is Rust9x https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/. But I think this is the effort of handful of people. It is behind the upstream rust and it could go away at any time. If you want to write a toy program in Rust then it is fine, but if you want something that's going to be supported long-term you're rolling the dice.
Python 3.4.4 is the last version of Python that will run on Windows XP. That's 10 years old and many things on PyPI now require newer versions of Python so you'd be stuck with old, unsupported versions of those modules, possibly containing security issues.
Pity. You can compile and run pretty much any version of Lua on XP with VS 2010 or lcc and it works just fine https://ibb.co/d0pMK7Jk
gopher://texto-plano.xyz:70/1/~anthk/bfgxp
Also, from some http proxy:
http://portal.mozz.us/gopher/texto-plano.xyz:70/1/~anthk/bfg...
MinC, a tiny C SDK plus Git and goodies from OpenBSD's base (ncurses it's included too):