[Bf-committers] Blender roadmap article on code blog

[Jürgen Herrmann]

Hi,

I don't think OpenGL 2.1 will cause problems at all on XP but API features of Windows do. We already had to patch OIIO to avoid calls to InterlockedCompareExchange64 because XP doesn't support it. 

In the future there will be more problems with API and compiler intrinsics not supported. So we'll have to work around these and use many ifdef blocks for XP compatibility.
That is actually what I am afraid of ;)


Am 17.06.2013 um 15:06 schrieb Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org>:

> Hi,
> 
> We only have to respect two aspects for supported platforms:
> 
> - be able to move forward with Blender in ways we like to
> - have developers available to keep platforms supported
> 
> Market shares don't have to play a role. I also don't know of any project here that would practically require to drop 32 bits. If someone has that issue, we can openly review that.
> 
> Same goes for XP support. I have no evidence it wouldn't allow to run opengl 2.1 features. 
> 
> -Ton-
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
> Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
> Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands
> 
> 
> 
> On 17 Jun, 2013, at 10:07, Jürgen Herrmann wrote:
> 
>> Hi Bastien,
>> Good to hear that I am not totally alone with my point of view ;-)
>> Ton sent in some interesting statistics of the blender.org website visitors:
>> 
>> http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-May/040268.html
>> http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-May/040269.html
>> http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-May/040274.html
>> 
>> And I started a poll in blenderartists :
>> http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?291199-32-or-64bit
>> 
>> The results speak for themselves ...
>> /Jürgen
>> 
>> Am 17.06.2013 um 09:43 schrieb Bastien Montagne <montagne29 at wanadoo.fr>:
>> 
>>> Please don’t be stupid! Comparing XP and Linux on a market share basis 
>>> is just pure nonsense. There’s at least two huge differences between 
>>> those OS's:
>>> *One is 12 years old, the other one is plain modern (don’t think anyone 
>>> would care to maintain Blender for over 10 years old linux, nor even for 
>>> OSX!).
>>> *Even though a few XP are listed in 
>>> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Supported_platforms (and I’m 
>>> not sure this list is really up-to-date), you’ll find far more Blender 
>>> devs under linux.
>>> 
>>> And despite the fact that XP is still about 40% of PCs connecting to the 
>>> web, you’ll have a hard time finding any commercial 3D software 
>>> supporting it (most don’t even support Vista anymore). While a fare 
>>> amount of them do support Linux.
>>> 
>>> It would interesting to know the amount of XP PCs that download Blender, 
>>> btw. My guess is that it would be far less than 40%.
>>> 
>>> So in a word, if we drop OpenGL below 2.1 (or even 3.0), it makes sense 
>>> to me to also drop XP. You can’t waist time (and even often limit your 
>>> app possibilities) to support obsolete stuff forever!
>>> 
>>> On 17/06/2013 06:52, Alexandr Kuznetsov wrote:
>>>> Drop linux. It has 1% market share, less than xp. No more x11 hacks. And
>>>> Mac OS X Tiger. Oops, too late. Somebody already did it.
>>>> 
>>>> On 6/17/2013 12:46 AM, Harley Acheson wrote:
>>>>> Jürgen,
>>>>> 
>>>>> If we are considering dropping Windows XP we should probably also
>>>>> consider dropping the other operating systems that have even less usage.
>>>>> Which is everything else besides Windows 7. So every version of
>>>>> Mac and all flavors of Linux combined.  LOL
>>>>> 
>>>>> Harley
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Bf-committers mailing list
>>>>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>>>>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Bf-committers mailing list
>>>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>>>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bf-committers mailing list
>>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bf-committers mailing list
>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers