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Is zig able to target WindowsXP?

• bcorp 7mo ago
  Yes! Zig's cross-compilation story is one of the reasons I chose it for this project. Zig can target x86-windows-gnu and lets you set os_version_min to .xp in the build config. This tells the linker to use only APIs available on XP SP3. In practice there were a few things I had to deal with: - RtlGetSystemTimePrecise doesn't exist on XP, so I wrote a compatibility shim that redirects to GetSystemTimeAsFileTime at startup - The build uses -OReleaseSmall, strips symbols, and is single-threaded to keep the binary small (~750 KB) and compatible with XP's threading model - There's a dedicated build-xp.zig that sets all the right flags, but you can also just do: zig build -Dtarget=x86-windows-gnu - No UCRT or MSVC runtime dependency — this was critical because XP doesn't ship with the Universal CRT, and you can't install it reliably on minimal XP systems The same codebase cross-compiles to Linux x86/x64/ARM with "zig build cross" — that's where Zig really shines compared to writing this in C with manual cross-compilation toolchains. One thing I should mention: Zig 0.15 (currently in use) dropped some older target support, but x86-windows with XP compat still works. I'd recommend testing with the exact version in the repo if you want to reproduce it.
  • fithisux 7mo ago
    Valuable information. Thanks!