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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

I almost thought the Windows XP support was meant as a joke. Seriously, why invest any effort for that? Isn't it in like its second year of not being supported by Microsoft anymore? Is a large portion of your contributors from China?

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Quite a large number of users on XP, yes. As has been said many times, if we judge by usage, Firefox would drop desktop Linux support before dropping Windows XP support. And we all want Rust code to make Firefox better, don't we?

(Not that this decision was just because of Firefox, mind you. Users ask for it.)

    >  Is a large portion of your contributors from China?

I don't know about a 'large portion' exactly, but yes, there is a lot of attention, interest, usage, and contributors from China.

Interestingly, a lot of emerging languages are seeing huge interest from China, though we often don't realize it over in the West. Go is another example of a language with an enormous Chinese backing.

>> Go is another example of a language with an enormous Chinese backing.

Is that simply because of the larger population, or is it actually more popular among developers in percentages? If the later, any idea why?

All of my sources are secondary, so I can't answer for certain. That said, we ought to expect any emerging market with a large population and a burgeoning tech industry to be represented to some degree (India being another example).

If Rust doesn't work on Windows XP then generally Firefox can't use Rust, because Windows XP support is a requirement for Firefox.

Its frequently requested by users. Like or not XP is still with us, and likely will be for a while -_-'

The argument frequently used is if supported platforms were decided by userbase size there would be no reason to support FreeBSD or Linux.

Linux on servers has been in the mainstream for a while now.

I hope Firefox isn't running on most of those.

The impression I got is that Rust isn't marketed as "a great language to build a new rendering engine for Firefox". It positions itself as "a great system language". If your system language doesn't run on machines hosting performance-critical software, that's a problem.

There are more Firefox users on Win XP than Linux. It would make more sense for FF to drop Linux support before WinXP.

Installations != # of Users

Although, servers have billions of users. ~Everyone on the Internet is a user of Linux servers.

Windows XP is still used widely in the wild. It's still not considered a first-class platform (we don't gate breaking changes on it), various bits of the stdlib are unavailable, and the compiler itself will never function on XP, but getting rudimentary support for cross-compiling code to XP is not an undue burden on the development team.

Windows XP marketshare is three times bigger than OS X and twelve times bigger than GNU/Linux. Why the Rusts development team would not put effort where it can get a good share of end-users?

Sort-of not supported, it can still get unofficial-official security updates until 2019.

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