[Bf-committers] Blender on Windows - some thoughts about XPand32bit

[Jürgen Herrmann]

Hi Ton,

Imho XP support is holding back the development if blender, sort of.
As long as we keep backward compatible with XP and VS2008 we have no access to some if the new intrinsic functions, introduced with Vista and newer. This is one of the reasons why Blender is still slower/not faster when built with VS2012+.
Another point is readability of our code. We'll have to ifdef much code in order to take advantage of new functionality.

I agree with you and Sergey. We shouldn't rush and do this carefully.

/Jürgen

----- Ursprüngliche Nachricht -----
Von: "Ton Roosendaal" <ton at blender.org>
Gesendet: ‎06.‎12.‎2013 15:56
An: "bf-blender developers" <bf-committers at blender.org>
Betreff: Re: [Bf-committers] Blender on Windows - some thoughts about XPand32bit

Hi,

I think we can keep supporting Windows XP (and any OS), for as long:

1) At least one developer helps building and supporting it
2) It's not holding back current and approved projects.

This we can communicate well though. 
XP users should be happy 2.69 is working well even.

Further, we can simply keep our code to be 32 bits compliant for a while. Also this is relatively easy to support and not really holding us back now.

-Ton-

--------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands



On 5 Dec, 2013, at 19:17, Sergey Sharybin wrote:

> We would need to drop XP at some point, but it should not be ASAP. It
> should be a clear for everyone process with defined release when we're
> dropping. Ideally it should be connected with switching to a new official
> compiler for windows. Meaning, when we're considering MSVC 2013 as a
> default to build blender on windows then we might stop maintaining old
> libraries and let XP support fade down naturally.
> 
> As for dropping support of 32bit -- i don't see good reason for this just
> yet. It might be 2-3 people who supports libs on windows, but i only know
> one who supports all the libs libs on linux. It's not much of hassle if we
> update libs only when we need this (meaning not just to be on a leading
> edge with brand-new libs).
> 
> Dropping 32bit windows builds would mean we're dropping atom support as
> well? It might be still useful to be able to run blender on a netbooks i'd
> say. Also, you might want to use PAE on 32bit platform because of some
> better load balance and so.
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Thomas Dinges <blender at dingto.org> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Mitchell,
>> this is strange, maybe its due to some compiler flags?
>> 
>> Maybe Visual Studio 2013 doesn't suffer from this, otherwise it would be
>> bad. Needs investigation.
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> Thomas
>> 
>> Am 05.12.2013 18:10, schrieb Mitchell Stokes:
>>> The last time I checked, vc11 created slower Blender builds than vc9 for
>>> the game engine. Not that I would like to stick to vc9, but vc11 isn't
>>> always faster. For a specific example, I've found OpenMP to be rather
>> slow.
>>> It's been a while since I last ran some tests, but I seem to remember the
>>> difference being at least 20%.
>>> 
>>> --Mitchell Stokes
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
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