Re: [boost] Windows XP support survey

Subject: Re: [boost] Windows XP support survey
From: Gevorg Voskanyan (gevbsd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-05-08 04:42:55

On 08.05.2015 5:39, Gavin Lambert wrote:
> This might eventually bite you.
>
> Granted that I haven't verified this myself, but one of the reasons 
> announced for the "_xp" vs. not-"_xp" toolsets was that the SDK team 
> had removed XP support from the latest Platform SDK. So one of the 
> things that _xp does is to select the older Platform SDK headers that 
> still do support XP.
>
> Most APIs are the same between XP and Vista/7, so *most of the time* 
> you can get away with using the wrong version, just like most of the 
> time you can get away with running code compiled with 
> _WIN32_WINNT=0x0601 on XP.
>
> If you happen to use one of the APIs that doesn't exist on XP, though, 
> or (harder to track down) if you use one of the APIs that does exist 
> on both but has had a structure size change, then you'll get code that 
> mysteriously fails on XP by using the wrong toolset and/or wrong 
> _WIN32_WINNT setting.
>

Good to know, thanks. No problems so far though.

> The toolset also affects which version of ATL/MFC are linked to, and 
> again since the newer versions of these do make use of 
> non-XP-compatible APIs in some classes, if you happen to use these in 
> your own code then you'll have problems on XP.  (And since this is an 
> implementation detail, it's not documented which classes are "safe" on 
> XP when using the non-XP toolset.)

ATL/MFC isn't used by that code.

Thank you,
Gevorg