On Fri, Feb 4, 2022 at 8:21 AM Marc-André Lureau
<marcandre.lureau(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi
On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 8:18 PM Kevin Kofler via devel
<devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> For the record:
>
>
https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/#msvcrt-vs-ucrt states:
> > MSVCRT […] Works out of the box on every Microsoft Windows versions.
>
> This is not entirely true. MSVCRT.DLL was introduced in Windows 95 OSR 2.
> The original Windows 95, with or without the only service pack released for
> it (SP1, because OSR 2 was not released as a service pack, only as an "OEM
> service release" for new computers), shipped only the even older CRTDLL.DLL
> (which MinGW stopped supporting years ago) out of the box, MSVCRT.DLL had to
> be installed through a redistributable (which was included with many
> applications including Microsoft Office, but it was not part of the
> operating system).
>
> But yes, for Windows releases ≥ 95 OSR 2 and < 10 (and no, Windows version
> numbers are not anywhere near monotonic ;-) ), MSVCRT is included out of the
> box, UCRT is not. Is it really a good default to depend on a runtime library
> that is only included in Windows ≥ 10?
This proposal doesn't change the default. Although we can discuss whether deprecating
msvcrt support in Fedora-MinGW would make sense today.
Fwiw, given that the primary use case for a cross-toolchain is for developer needs, I
think it is reasonable to have only UCRT target in the future.
Projects releasing for Windows should probably natively build and test their releases
with Msys2, and they can do so for msvcrt targets.
But there is at least one user that may legitimately want to keep a msvcrt 32bit target:
mingw-wine-gecko.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been a ton of incentive for Windows
developers to switch to 64-bit. Heck, Visual Studio itself only
switched a couple of years ago.
A lot of the extended Windows dev ecosystem hasn't gotten to 64-bit
either, yet :(
I think it's good to have the UCRT target, but dropping the existing
ones would be extremely painful.
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!