[Bf-committers] Windows XP and the future of Blender

[Jürgen Herrmann]

Hi there,

another status update for Windows XP support with VS 2012.

I have managed to get an XP Computer to test Blender (VS2012 Builds) and found several problems:

- When I compile Blender with all features it doesn't start on Windows XP stating that "InterlockedCompareExchange64" is not available in kernel32.dll
- When compiled without Cycles Blender starts up and crashes instantly when trying to load python33.dll (I tried to recompile python with different configs and optimizations but nothing helps)
- libs and blender have to be compiled without the /Oi flag for compiler intrinsics which takes away some speed on Vista-Win8 systems
- Compiling libs and blender for XP is not easy and bears many possibilities to make an error, which breaks compatibility.

I just don't get it to work with XP :(
Blender and the dependencies are quite complex and finding errors gets very time consuming.

I don't think Windows XP support is worth so much time though and I'd rather like to fully support modern OS Systems and bring full speed to them instead of slowing down blender in order to support old XP.

Imho we should keep VC2008 parallel to VS2012 as long as possible to build XP binaries with VC2008 and binaries for newer Windows Versions with 2012. When support for these old VS 2008 libs gets too stressful we can still drop support for WinXP.


/Jürgen