An IDE interface for Windows 7

Hello,
I managed to install Julia on Windows 7, but I’m having trouble setting up VSCodium 1.70.2:

Trying to locate Julia binary...
Juliaup not found, locating Julia by other means.
No Julia executable was identified.
The current PATH environment variable is "C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin".
Trying to locate Julia binary...
Juliaup not found, locating Julia by other means.
Trying to locate Julia binary...
Juliaup not found, locating Julia by other means.
Trying to locate Julia binary...
Juliaup not found, locating Julia by other means.
No Julia executable was identified.
The current PATH environment variable is "C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin".
No Julia executable was identified.
The current PATH environment variable is "C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin".
No Julia executable was identified.
The current PATH environment variable is "C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;C:\Windows\System32\Wbem;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\VSCodium\bin,C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin".

And:

I need an IDE that works on Windows 7.

Thank you.

On windows, I usually add the path to the julia executable to the PATH variable (environment variables) and its works without any issue.

I see that your PATH variable includes a comma (“,”). Try to replace this with a semicolon (“;”) and reboot if necessary.

1 Like

Hello,
The PATH variables are:

C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\VSCodium\bin;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin

%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\VSCodium\bin;C:\Users\vboxuser\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia-1.10.9\bin;%systemroot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\bin;C:\Program Files\VSCodium\bin

When I type julia in CMD and press Enter, the Julia environment opens. I got the following error:

I changed the path to:

C:\\Users\\vboxuser\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Julia-1.10.9\\bin\\julia.exe
1 Like

Hello,
What other IDEs can I use?

Thank you.

I fear you’re in for a world of pain. After every hurdle you clear, another one will pop up. Windows 7 is old enough to legally drive a car in the US, and has been unsupported for ten years now. Microsoft doesn’t even allow you to pay them extra for support anymore — that ended five years ago.

So even if someone did this work for you and found something that works, you’ll likely hit another issue. And another. And another.

If that’s fun for you, awesome! But it doesn’t seem like you’re interested in doing much legwork here yourself.

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You could try to use the portable version of julia (; this is what I always do).

Not a bad idea. Linking here for OP: https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/winnt/x64/1.11/julia-1.11.6-win64.zip

Does the portable version get releases at the same time as the non portable version?

Also, Windows 7 was a great OS. Win 10 support is ending in October and I’ve seen enough garbage in Win 10 and 11 that I’m finally going to jump ship to Linux (Pop_OS). I’ve been using it off and on for a year or two now for Julia development and it’s been great. I highly recommend for anyone in a similar situation as OP.

2 Likes

Hello,
Thank you so much for your reply.
The problem is not Julia. I have installed Julia version 1.10.9. My problem is VSCodium. Can anyone install a Windows 7 x64 in VirtualBox and test it?

very unlikely, it might be easier for you to install Julia in virtual machine with newer windows or something

Hello,
Thank you so much for your reply.
The problem is that my system is old and I can’t install Windows 10 on it. Its hardware specifications are not strong enough for me to install a virtual machine on it.

Microsoft says these are system requirements for Windows 10:

which I would say are are below what is required to run Julia and VSCode for most practical purposes.

Hello,
Do you think Windows 10 can even function properly with 1 GB of RAM? It will probably just boot up.

Minimum requirements aim for usability, but it’s definitely not the ideal experience. IIRC, the typical RAM capacity was 4GB in 2015 when Windows 10 released; for comparison, VS Code released in 2015, and VS Codium and Julia v1 released in 2018, so it’s worth checking what versions intentionally support Windows 7. 32-bit addresses are constrained to 4GB of course, though PAE and multiple processes extend that.

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Is there a special reason you need to stick with Windows at all? I think the usual recommendation for working on older/lower-resource computers is to grab a Linux/BSD install with a low-resource windows manager (e.g., Xfce, etc.) It’d be better from a security standpoint, at least.

In terms of IDEs, the other ones people use here are emacs and vim/neovim. Those will likely be better for a low-resource environment than vscode, but have the downside of taking more trouble to install/configure (especially to get anything like a “full” IDE experience). However, I have no idea if there would be issues compiling/running those on such an old version of windows.

6 Likes

Hello,
Thank you for your suggestion.
The user who wants to work with this system is a teenager who only knows Windows.

Hello,
I’m sure that both VSCodium and the Julia extension existed in Windows 7. Let’s say it’s the Windows 7 era now, which versions were there?

Julia for VSCode v0. 1 was released in 2016, four years after the release of Windows 8 and one year after the realise of Windows 10 - so there likely wasn’t ever a version that targeted Windows 7.

I’ll also repeat my point from above, if your system doesn’t meet the minimum Win10 requirements I doubt that Julia + VSCode + Julia plug in will be running at usable speeds.

Hello,
What other IDEs can I use on Windows 7?

You could maybe consider having a chat with your LLM of choice about this since it’s veered off the topic of Julia considerably.

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