vectorcraft/docs/windows7.md

Windows 7 x64 compatibility build (experimental, unsupported)

Windows 7 is not a supported platform. This build is experimental and community-maintained, and the VectorCraft maintainers have not verified it on Windows 7.

This separate build targets 64-bit Windows 7 SP1. It uses OpenGL instead of wgpu, and omits the native AccessKit accessibility adapter. Printer discovery supports the PowerShell version included with Windows 7, and printer setup opens Control Panel. Printing retains the PDF viewer's Print/PrintTo verb on this build: Windows 7 has no Windows.Data.Pdf renderer. The win7 target excludes craft-print from its dependency tree; normal desktop builds use the shared spooler. The windows7 feature and dedicated win7 target must be selected together; the existing compile-time guards reject mixing this feature with the ordinary Windows target. The normal desktop and web builds retain their existing defaults. A vendor graphics driver providing OpenGL 3.3 or newer is required; the Windows built-in generic display driver is insufficient. GPU selection in Preferences and WGPU_POWER_PREF do not control this OpenGL build.

Build or download

In your GitHub fork, open Actions → Windows 7 x64 compatibility → Run workflow (it also runs weekly and on pull requests changing the compatibility path). When it succeeds, download the vectorcraft-windows7-x64-portable artifact, extract the contained portable ZIP, then run vectorcraft.exe on Windows 7. The CLI is included. No MSI is provided: the existing installer remains for modern Windows.

To build locally, use a Windows 10/11 build computer, with Rust/rustup and Visual Studio 2022 C++ build tools (x64 compiler and Windows SDK). Open an x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022, change to your clone's repository root (the directory containing Cargo.toml), and run:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File packaging/windows/windows7.ps1

Add -Test to also run the app and CLI tests on the build computer.

Output: dist/release/vectorcraft-windows7-x64-portable.zip. The script installs the pinned nightly compiler and rust-src, rebuilds the standard library for x86_64-win7-windows-msvc, and links the C runtime statically. It never installs Rust on the Windows 7 machine. The optional CRAFT_FONTS_DIR setting works as in the normal build. Without it, install fonts for the languages you need on the destination machine.

The Windows 7 target matters: modern Rust's ordinary x86_64-pc-windows-msvc target requires Windows 10, including standard-library and random-number APIs. Selecting OpenGL alone or changing an installer version check cannot fix that.

References: Rust's Windows 7 target and Windows baseline change.

The packaging script checks x64 PE headers, the subsystem version, and known incompatible imports (including GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime) before creating the ZIP. This is a regression check, not an exhaustive audit of every Windows API.

The small vendored windows-link patch routes CoTaskMemFree to its documented ole32.dll export on the Windows 7 target; the newer binding otherwise imports combase.dll, which is absent on Windows 7. Only this script uses it: it passes --config "patch.crates-io.windows-link.path='vendor/windows-link'" to Cargo, so every other build, including the normal Windows one, keeps the checksum-verified crates.io crate. Cargo records the patch in Cargo.lock, so the script resolves once, fails if anything other than windows-link's source changed, builds with --locked, and then restores Cargo.lock.

Runtime validation

The contributor reports that a user ran the portable x64 compatibility build on Windows 7 SP1 with an NVIDIA graphics card. Their original build failed at startup with GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime missing from kernel32.dll; the compatibility build resolved that failure. The tested build was based on upstream commit 1f7873273b67007b0aefc63313e0d34a39f45453. The exact GPU/driver version and completion of every checklist item below were not recorded, and the maintainers have not reproduced it, so the build remains experimental and unsupported.

Runtime acceptance checklist

A successful build on the Windows 2022 CI runner does not prove Windows 7 runtime compatibility. Before declaring support, test on a Windows 7 SP1 x64 machine and record its GPU, driver version, Windows updates and any missing-DLL/entry-point error:

• Start vectorcraft.exe; verify a visible canvas, resizing, minimize/restore and exit.
• Draw a shape, save a .vectorcraft document, close and reopen it.
• Open examples/dusk-poster.vectorcraft; export PNG and PDF and inspect both.
• Exercise native Open/Save dialogs, clipboard text/images and drag-and-drop.
• Change a preference, exit and verify it survives restarting.
• Run vectorcraft-cli.exe --version and a headless export from a Command Prompt in the extracted application folder.

This build is experimental until that checklist passes. New dependency versions can add newer Windows imports, so retain Cargo.lock and repeat runtime QA after dependency updates.