This might be better discussed in another topic, however I'll post here for now......
I think we should look at what Windows versions we support with our pre-compiled downloads. If not now then definitely for the next release, i.e. 0.17.
I know we have discussed this earlier but the recent high publicity around the two new massive hardware security faults, (MeltDown and Spectre) found in mostly Intel 64bit CPUs (apparently nearly all of them since 1995!) as well as some ARM CPUs, made me wonder if we should reassess if we are being irresponsible supporting Windows versions that have had all MS support dropped. Mostly due to the PPA system, we have more or less automatically dropped support for old unsupported Ubuntu variants.
This is a link to one random article about the above "Meltdown and Spectre".
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16844 ... dows-linux
XP was used on some CNC machines. I saw a CNC machine running Windows many years ago, I am sure it was before XP was ever released so I think it had Win98 or even 95. To the best of my knowledge, no one was stupid enough to offer CNC machines running Vista, but I don't claim to be an expert on any of this.
In reading about Spectre and Meltdown, I noticed that MS will not be providing any patches to protect Vista users. I was wonder why as I though MS was still supporting Vista but apparently they dropped all support in April 2017! Here is a random article about the dropping of Vista support....(by the way MS's solution is to buy a new Windows and they suggest win10 which I thought had famously dropped support for many not so old CPUs etc.)..
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/11/windows ... osoft.html
Obviously a better solution is to install Linux, probably Ubuntu or a Ubuntu variant.
This is an article from 2009 about the then upcoming Windows 7 regarding 32bit and 64bit versions.
https://www.techspot.com/guides/177-win ... bit-64bit/
I would have like to say also lets drop Win32 but since Win7-32bit is still supported and there may well be a lot of 32bit users out there, we shouldn't drop 32bit yet. I guess and could be wrong, that many Win32bit downloads are mistakes and are being run on Win64.
Anyway I suggest that
1) (this is less important) we deprecate 32 bit, still make it available but make it a little more difficult to find and add a warning of some sort.
2) we do not offer any pre-compiled binaries for download which support Windows earlier than Win7
If you guys want to discuss this in any detail then I will happily spilt it off into another topic.
Jim
Edit: - To give you some idea of how low the Linux Kernel developers opinion of Intel letting this bug exist is, read this article at "The Register" linked below and note about halfway down under the heading "impact" that the Linux guys were going to produce a patch named "Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines" so that its acronym could be "word censored".
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/0 ... sign_flaw/