Consider Dropping support for Windows XP

[steveklabnik]

We still support targeting Windows XP as a platform, but it’s always been a bit… odd. We don’t make the same guarantees about it as other platforms.

Firefox 52 ESR was the last version to support XP and Vista. Current Firefox ESR is 60.

If we wanted to be aggressive, we could drop support for Vista as well, it has smaller market share (from what I’ve read) than XP, but in my understanding, it’s good enough to be a full platform, and so there’s less reason to drop it.

Thoughts?

[alexcrichton]

I’m totally down for dropping ancient support myself! The threshold I’d use is finding users who motivated the initial inclusion and otherwise canvassing if there’s any users today of the support. Firefox was the initial motivator for XP support (and has since moved on as you mentioned, yay!). I believe Dropbox may have expressed desire in wanting to rely on this at one point, but I’m not sure if they ever did or if they would still need to.

If we can’t find any XP users (or Vista) it seems fine to drop to me!

[Centril]

The threshold I’d use is finding users who motivated the initial inclusion and otherwise canvassing if there’s any users today of the support.

Seems like an RFC would be good to flesh that out.

[steveklabnik]

As one great example, apparently panics have been broken since June 2016: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34538

[steveklabnik]

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