I'd recommend reading the MCP[1] they linked regarding the decision as well as their target tier policy [2]. They are dropping tier 1 support for Win 7 and Win

I'd recommend reading the MCP[1] they linked regarding the decision as well as their target tier policy [2]. They are dropping tier 1 support for Win 7 and Win 8. That means they are no longer going to guarantee that the project builds on those platforms and passes all tests via CI. As long as it is feasible they will probably keep CI runs for those platforms and if interested parties step up and provide sufficient maintenance support, it will remain tier 2. i.e a guarantee that it builds on those platforms via CI but not necessarily that all features are supported and guaranteed via passing tests. If interested parties can provide sufficient maintenance that all tests continue passing, it will be tier 1 in all but name. However the rest of the development community won't waste their time with issues like Win 7 and 8's partial support for UTF-8. And once CI stops being feasible for the compiler team to host, it'll drop down to tier 3. If there's sufficient interest from the community towards maintaining these targets, in practice you should see comparable support to with tiers 1 or 2 however now any CI will be managed externally by the community and the compiler team will stop worrying about changes that could break compilation on those targets. TLDR: They aren't saying "it'll no longer work" but rather "if you want it to stay maintained for these targets, you have to pitch in dev hours to maintain it and eventually support the infrastructure to do this because we don't see a reason to continue doing this". So if you care for these targets, you'll have to contribute to keep it maintained. [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/651 https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/651 [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/target-tier-policy.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/target-tier-policy.html