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Posted: 2024-12-03

Rust9x update: Rust 1.84.0-beta

'Ferrissoft Visual Rust 9X', logo in the style of old Visual Studio logos

Another year has passed, oh how the time flies! Time for some Tier 4 target action once again!

Rust9x adds support for Windows 9x and older NT-based Windows versions to Rust. See the project wiki on Github: rust9x/rust.

What's new? #

  • Rebased and reimplemented all fallback code ontop of the ~29600 commits of progress from Rust 1.76 to Rust 1.84-beta
  • The thread parker now only conditionally falls back to the basic, generic one. If supported by the OS, Rust9x will instead choose the NtCreateEvent-based parker or the futex/WaitOnAddress-based one.
  • Better RwLock implementation: Rust9x now uses the upstream queue implementation instead of falling back to a simple Mutex. Similarly, Once also uses the queue implementation now.
    • Since these fallbacks rely on the thread parker only, they should run much faster with the new thread parker fallbacks above, too!
  • Cleaned up the fallback implementations to intrude less on normal non-rust9x Rust windows-msvc targets.

What's next? #

  • I'll try to keep up with 1.84 beta branch changes for now.
  • TLS is as bad as ever. Even with the native TLS callback, Drop impls will not run on 9x. I still hope to get to the bottom of this!
  • Windows NT 3.51 is currently broken (failing on _chkstk stack probes when doing stdio, but only then). NT 4 and Windows 95 RTM work fine.
  • Reimplementing the fileextd.lib fallbacks in Rust will give us a much more complete std::fs implementation on Windows XP (and possibly earlier NT-based systems).
  • The fallback from WinSock2 to WinSock 1.1 should actually be pretty simple to implement. It would give us networking support without extra DLL dependencies on Windows 95 RTM and NT 3.51.

For now I won't publish a precompiled package (the install scripts are insanely slow on Windows). I'd rather work on the above fixes and leave compiling as an exercise to the reader :^). You can find build instructions in the Wiki.

Please don't expect too much, though - Path of Exile 2 is launching into EA soon, too, so I'll be busy with that!

Feel free to hit me up on Discord if you'd like to help out or just chat about Rust9x!