Do we care about Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 anymore?

[Alan Bateman]

We have code in a number area of the libraries that is only required for 
really old versions of Windows, specifically Windows XP and Windows 
Server 2003. I'm wondering whether anyone would care if this code were 
to go away in JDK 9. I don't know when JDK 9 might GA but 2 years after 
JDK 8 GA is March 2016.

It's clear that Windows XP is at death's door with security patches 
coming to an end very soon. The wikipedia for Windows Server 2003 
suggests that its mainstream support ended in 2009 with "extended 
support" running out in 2015.

Oracle's JDK 7 download page lists Windows XP and Windows Server 2008 as 
the oldest versions of Windows supported. For Oracle's JDK 8 then the 
preliminary list of supported platforms [1] has Windows Vista and 
Windows Server 2008 R2 as the oldest versions.

The other part to this is the toolchain. I don't know which versions of 
Visual C++ and SDK will be used by Oracle and others to build JDK 9 but 
I would assume that any rev'ing of the compiler/SDK might mean the 
binaries won't run on Windows XP or 2003 anyway.

If there isn't any issue with dropping this old code (and cleaning up 
code that has alternatives paths depending on whether specific win32 
functions exist or not) then it might be good to do this early in JDK 9 
so as to maximize the chances of finding issues that often stem from 
removing or refactoring old code.

-Alan

[1] https://jdk8.java.net/jdk8_supported_platforms.html