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That's great! I didn't know about it. Would anyone happen to know how does it compare with the applications on Linux? Are they similarly forward compatible?

copperx 10y ago
Oh, in no way, shape, or form, unless the application was statically linked, which is uncommon.
- wz1000 10y ago
  You could always run them in a container.
- creshal 10y ago
  Closed source programs usually are, exactly for that reason. (Or at least ship all libraries they link to, up to and including the libc.) Go also makes it relatively easy to statically compile everything, one of the reasons why it's gaining popularity. Apart from those two it's highly uncommon: You're supposed to ship sources and compile them on the target system. To get a sort of forward compatibility you'd need to find compatible sources for all involved userland, or ship them with your sources. The latter is sometimes used in larger projects, to work around distributions having wildly incompatible versions of whatever library you need (Samba, Firefox, LibreOffice e.g.).
tehrei 10y ago
To expand on copperx, they might be. Since you can have several versions of a lib installed and the kernel<->userspace interface is stable, if you can get the old versions you need for your distro, then you can run the application. At worst, you might need to compile from source (which I do realise can take a lot of time and effort). So the kind-of proper answer to that question is, "if you want to run a popular old application on a popular current distro, there is probably a repository you can pull packages from that will allow you to do it, otherwise it's somewhat of a crapshoot".
josteink 10y ago
Absolutely not, at least not on compiled form. It's not all black though: this problem is usually offset by the fact that most Linux software is open source and can be recompiled against the new platform source. You take some, you give some. The result is quite different but looks the same to the end user.

copperx 10y ago

Oh, in no way, shape, or form, unless the application was statically linked, which is uncommon.

wz1000 10y ago
You could always run them in a container.
creshal 10y ago
Closed source programs usually are, exactly for that reason. (Or at least ship all libraries they link to, up to and including the libc.) Go also makes it relatively easy to statically compile everything, one of the reasons why it's gaining popularity. Apart from those two it's highly uncommon: You're supposed to ship sources and compile them on the target system. To get a sort of forward compatibility you'd need to find compatible sources for all involved userland, or ship them with your sources. The latter is sometimes used in larger projects, to work around distributions having wildly incompatible versions of whatever library you need (Samba, Firefox, LibreOffice e.g.).

tehrei 10y ago

To expand on copperx, they might be. Since you can have several versions of a lib installed and the kernel<->userspace interface is stable, if you can get the old versions you need for your distro, then you can run the application. At worst, you might need to compile from source (which I do realise can take a lot of time and effort). So the kind-of proper answer to that question is, "if you want to run a popular old application on a popular current distro, there is probably a repository you can pull packages from that will allow you to do it, otherwise it's somewhat of a crapshoot".

josteink 10y ago

Absolutely not, at least not on compiled form. It's not all black though: this problem is usually offset by the fact that most Linux software is open source and can be recompiled against the new platform source. You take some, you give some. The result is quite different but looks the same to the end user.