Demoting i686-pc-windows-gnu to Tier 2 (blog.rust-lang.org)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

32 bit Windows is probably no big loss. The real headline is this:

“The *-windows-gnu targets currently do not have any dedicated target maintainers. We do not have a lot of expertise for this toolchain, and issues often aren't fixed and cause problems in CI that we have a hard time to debug.”

That means 64 bit Windows support as well. That is a pretty big deal. How is it possible that Microsoft uses Rust in Windows now and yet there are no Windows maintainers? Isn’t their new Edit written in Rust too?

This is where is shake my head at corporate support. Microsoft has 200,000 employees. They cannot spare one for Rust?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Only the GNU-based targets are being demoted, not the MSVC-based ones.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Yeah, but those are the not-annoying ones. I don't care to spend 10 days installing 10 versions of the "Microsoft(c)(r) C++ Redistributable" or whatever it is called and 25 KBs in the right order with reboots in between on slowdows just to get a fucking compiler in CI. Compare this with a 5 second apt-get install mingw-gcc and done.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Sure, but the comment I was responding to seemed to be operating under the misunderstanding that there were no Windows maintainers at all, rather than just no maintainers for the GNU toolchain. In particular, the following remark gives the impression that they believe that no one at Microsoft is supporting Rust on Windows at all:

This is where is shake my head at corporate support. Microsoft has 200,000 employees. They cannot spare one for Rust?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

I did misunderstand. Thank you.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Right. My mistake.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

As an Open Source and Linux fan, this is a little bit sour news. I don't know how this impacts real world. For anyone who does cross compile Windows apps from Linux, does this affect in any way? Article says it won't. So Tier 2 only means how much of bug testing and development is devoted to it, right?

[-] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

It only affects people who are cross compiling for 32-bit Windows from Linux. Considering that the last 32 bit only x86 CPU came out over 20 years ago, I bet you can count the number of people who will be affected by this on one hand.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

And it really only concerns a certain subset - 32bit applications compiled with the gnu toolchain. I'm glad they keep the workload in check this way.

this post was submitted on 26 May 2025

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