4 ms·

If Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility. After all, Windows is the operating system running old nuclear codes, hospital monitors, army na

If Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility. After all, Windows is the operating system running old nuclear codes, hospital monitors, army navigation systems, etc unchanged from the 90's. So your retro games will play just fine on the latest version. VirtualBox or QEMU will run Windows 95 more "natively" if you need serious Windows 95 emulation.

ekianjo 8y ago
> Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility Except for games. Between XP and 7 many games broke, and the same thing happened again between 7 and 10. There are numerous examples out there.
- jchw 8y ago
  In fairness, they painted themselves into a corner with intracate APIs designed to skip the normal hardware abstraction layers. It probably takes a ton of effort just to keep old DirectX APIs working through architectural changes. Also, supporting 16 bit software in long mode requires emulation, and they chose not to.
- m-p-3 8y ago
  They completely changed the driver architecture, it was bound to cause some incompatibilities.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  I dunno about broke, if they had backported the DirectX stuff to XP there would not have been a breakage. But MS tried to use DX10 as an upsell of Vista, thus making DX9 the last directX version on XP. What we ended up with was a whole host of game engines that stuck with DX9 to try to reach the largest possible market.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  True, but compared to game console backward-compatibility or that you often have to recompile things to get them to work between linux distros made the same year, Windows is pretty damn good about backwards compatibility.
digi_owl 8y ago
I really with the FOSS world would take backwards compatiblity more seriously, but all i hear is "we lack resources" when it is more correct to say those rainbow haired devs think C and such stale and boring.
- vortico 8y ago
  What FOSS projects have you improved the backwards compatibility of? This isn't a discussion of C verses another language. The issue with backward compatibility on Linux (for example) is mostly the versions of glibc, libstdc++, ALSA, X11, OpenGL, etc. which are all C APIs. Backwards compatibility isn't much of a problem with open-source software, because you can solve ABI issues by simply compiling yourself, and API issues by deriving the source code yourself (or using someone else's patch.)
  - franga2000 8y ago
    > you can solve ABI issues by simply compiling yourself As much as I would love it to be, not all Linux software is open-source (or even source-available). Especially in the (disgusting) world of enterprise software, ABI compatibility is crucial because the word "update" basically isn't in their vocabularies. Recompiling isn't backwards compatibility. It's essentially an update. Backwards compatibility implies it Just Works™.
    - vortico 8y ago
      We're talking about open-source software. And in most cases, open-source software is delivered and installed by source, and there's no such thing as an ABI issue in this case. Only API issues remain.

ekianjo 8y ago

> Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility Except for games. Between XP and 7 many games broke, and the same thing happened again between 7 and 10. There are numerous examples out there.

jchw 8y ago
In fairness, they painted themselves into a corner with intracate APIs designed to skip the normal hardware abstraction layers. It probably takes a ton of effort just to keep old DirectX APIs working through architectural changes. Also, supporting 16 bit software in long mode requires emulation, and they chose not to.
m-p-3 8y ago
They completely changed the driver architecture, it was bound to cause some incompatibilities.
digi_owl 8y ago
I dunno about broke, if they had backported the DirectX stuff to XP there would not have been a breakage. But MS tried to use DX10 as an upsell of Vista, thus making DX9 the last directX version on XP. What we ended up with was a whole host of game engines that stuck with DX9 to try to reach the largest possible market.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
True, but compared to game console backward-compatibility or that you often have to recompile things to get them to work between linux distros made the same year, Windows is pretty damn good about backwards compatibility.

digi_owl 8y ago

I really with the FOSS world would take backwards compatiblity more seriously, but all i hear is "we lack resources" when it is more correct to say those rainbow haired devs think C and such stale and boring.

vortico 8y ago
What FOSS projects have you improved the backwards compatibility of? This isn't a discussion of C verses another language. The issue with backward compatibility on Linux (for example) is mostly the versions of glibc, libstdc++, ALSA, X11, OpenGL, etc. which are all C APIs. Backwards compatibility isn't much of a problem with open-source software, because you can solve ABI issues by simply compiling yourself, and API issues by deriving the source code yourself (or using someone else's patch.)
- franga2000 8y ago
  > you can solve ABI issues by simply compiling yourself As much as I would love it to be, not all Linux software is open-source (or even source-available). Especially in the (disgusting) world of enterprise software, ABI compatibility is crucial because the word "update" basically isn't in their vocabularies. Recompiling isn't backwards compatibility. It's essentially an update. Backwards compatibility implies it Just Works™.
  - vortico 8y ago
    We're talking about open-source software. And in most cases, open-source software is delivered and installed by source, and there's no such thing as an ABI issue in this case. Only API issues remain.