Unofficial "Tier 4" Rust Target for older Windows versions
7 comments
·November 18, 2025vbezhenar
I wish more languages support old platforms. I'm working in a company and a lot of our customers are running Windows 7 and 8, few of them running Vista. I have to use ancient versions of development tools to target those. For example stuck on Java 8 for eternity. It's PITA.
userbinator
It's not hard to do either, especially on Windows where backwards-compatibility is almost completely guaranteed.
Of course those in the planned obsolescence mindset would fight hard against it, because then it would be harder for us to take the good without the bad.
NooneAtAll3
considering the all-insistence of rust on using internet for all the libraries, this doesn't seem like a good idea...
umanwizard
The idea of running Rust code on Windows 95 is very funny to me. Two completely different universes colliding.
sedatk
IIRC, somebody ran .NET on Windows 3.1.
lifthrasiir
I think it was Windows 95: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUMNtKQLl8
An interesting bit of history: for a long time Rust maintained first party support for Windows XP, after other parts of ecosystem generally gave up. This was because Firefox needed it.
https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/378 (major change proposal to drop Windows XP support) notes this history and links to other relevant pages.