Microsoft: We didn't block Windows Terminal on old CPUs without SSE4.2 (PopCnt) on purpose

Microsoft, earlier today, published the latest Stable version of Windows Terminal, and it has a significant change that will affect those users who are running PCs with older processors, like Intel Core 2 Duos, in a positive way. The company had recently updated the compiler following which it stopped working on such CPUs which lack PopCnt and SSE 4.2 instructions.

While users started questioning the tech giant's motives behind it, Microsoft's Dustin L. Howett, who maintains and looks over the Terminal repo on GitHub, confirmed this was not Microsoft trying to block older CPUs, without those instructions, ie, Core 2 Duos, Core 2 Quads or even older parts, on purpose.

Howett commented on the issue:

Put away your conspiracy theories, folks.

 

There's a compiler bug in MSVC 19.38 that results in the output of the CPUID instruction being misinterpreted, among other things. It turns out that the 1057x build series of Terminal was built with MSVC 19.38.

In case you are wondering, Microsoft recently fixed a buggy Visual C++ Libraries (VCLibs) package implementation which wrongly mandated the need for SSE4.2. You can find the details about that update in our dedicated article here.

The full changelog for Windows Terminal Stable version 1.19.10821.0 is given below:

Bug Fixes and Changes

 

• We've rolled back to an older compiler to get Terminal working on Intel Core 2 Duo machines again (!) (#16907)

• ReadConsoleOutputCharacterW no longer fails on lines containing narrow surrogate pairs (#16898)
• Auto-detected URLs and search results are no longer pushed around by wide characters (oops) (#16787) (thanks @comzyh and @lhecker!)
• We will now display control characters literally if they were produced with the Windows Console APIs (#16825) (thanks @j4james!)
• Entering the tab switcher via the command palette no longer selects the wrong tab (#16858) (thanks @AlejandroBlanco2001!)
• All localizations are now checked into the project, so you can build any historic version with all of its original languages (#16835)

As such, the next preview version, 1.20.10822.0, is also out:

Bug Fixes and Changes

 

• We've rolled back to an older compiler to get Terminal working on Intel Core 2 Duo machines again (!) (#16907)

• ReadConsoleOutputCharacterW no longer fails on lines containing narrow surrogate pairs (#16898)
• Auto-detected URLs and search results are no longer pushed around by wide characters (oops) (#16787) (thanks @comzyh and @lhecker!)
• We will now display control characters literally if they were produced with the Windows Console APIs (#16825) (thanks @j4james!)
• So many of you have screenshots that contain our "set terminal as default?" banner, which we take to mean that you never noticed it. We got rid of it. Balance is restored. (#16873)
• Entering the tab switcher via the command palette no longer selects the wrong tab (#16858) (thanks @AlejandroBlanco2001!)
• All localizations are now checked into the project, so you can build any historic version with all of its original languages (#16835)

You can download the latest Windows Terminal Stable version from its GitHub page.

Source