[Lazarus] Lazarus - Windows NT4

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

On 06/04/18 18:30, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus wrote:
> On 2018-04-06 16:26, Reinhold via Lazarus wrote:> I compiled a lazarus project with lazarus 1.8.0 and 1.8.2. This error > occurs (s. appendix):> > With 1.6.4 is no problem.> > Is this a bug, or is Win NT4 out of time?
> It's not so much about Lazarus as far as I know, but more about whichversion of FPC (the compiler) you are using. You can install differentversions of FPC and use them all with the same copy of Lazarus - I dothis all the time.
> You probably need FPC 2.6.x or FPC 2.4.x to support NT4. I'm sure thewiki will tell you when which Windows versions got dropped. Search thewiki for the FPC changelogs.

I agree, with the caveat that each version of Lazarus tends to work with 
a fairly tight range of compiler versions.

I can't give accurate version numbers without spending time looking 
things up, but somewhere around 2.6.x FPC started assuming Unicode 
handling that was documented but unimplemented in NT4. At that point 
there was a simple patch which could be applied to the RTL (?) to fix 
it, but realistically it made that version the last that supported NT 
(and I suspect '98).

I appreciate that some people have no choice but to use NT4, typically 
because it is running on rack-mounted "industrial computers" or similar. 
But I'd suggest that wherever there is a choice it would be better to 
look at W2K if at all possible, which while still well out of support at 
least doesn't "self destruct" like XP. At the very least, use W2K for 
development and then test on NT4.

18803 is relevant but might not be the only issue.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]