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Yeah, I was having a long discussion about this with a friend, and this is precisely where the misconception lies. The problem with the 32->64 transition (or x

by Jetrel 6y ago

Yeah, I was having a long discussion about this with a friend, and this is precisely where the misconception lies. The problem with the 32->64 transition (or x86->ARM) doesn't lie with active businesses failing to "get with the program" and update their software - it lies with abandonware. With software that's been put out either by defunct companies or sometimes literally deceased programmers. In some niches, this sort of stuff is really, really common - generally this is the case if there's a really stable API for building things, like VST plugins, and if the niche in question has a lot of failed businesses. A lot of times in the pro audio space, a musician will spend a large part of their career "collecting" a ton of little one-off sound libraries and fx plugins, because these are the only way they can get the computer to produce that exact kind of sound they're looking for. This collection slowly builds up over the course of, say, a decade - just like a graphic designer would collect fonts. The difference is that unlike fonts, which last had their "greet the reaper" moment back when bitmap fonts got scrapped in the mid-90s (despite OpenType becoming a thing, TrueType fonts from the 90s still work fine, some 30 years later), any audio plugins that aren't compatible with the cpu architecture die out. And that's just really brutal to a working musician. You can't get an update to most of those because there's a ton of attrition in that industry; lots of small-time plugin makers realize pretty fast that it's a very difficult place to make any kind of ROI, so they quit after a few years. -- Games are in a really similar place - they're a business slaughterhouse where most companies that attempt to make something discover they're not going to cover the initial investment, so after the game's produced it typically gets a couple of years of barebones support, and then gets abandoned - or the company just croaks. Any kind of rewrite is completely out of the question. The tragedy is that most of these games are pretty good and fun, they're just not economically viable. I love apple moving the tech forward, but we desperately need a better emulation solution, and/or we've got to get the industry off of coding for bare metal.

freehunter 6y ago
I am sympathetic, don’t get me wrong, but this isn’t the only industry and this isn’t the only time this has happened. It happens every day in every industry and has been happening forever and will continue to happen forever. The old example is buggy whips, someone might have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making or collecting whips for horses only to have thar investment disappear when cars came around. Or making/collecting spears just as the Roman army switched to swords. Or medieval turnip farmers when suddenly everyone wanted to eat the newly discovered potato. Or people who bought all their favorite movies on Betamax and can’t easily watch them anymore. There are very few creators who actually create the things they rely on to create, ultimately we are all consumers even inside our professions. And like any consumer, we are all at the mercy of a market we don’t control. Either you have to accept that everything must come to an end and plan for that eventual end, or you have to dig deeper into your creativity. Everyone has something they rely on that will disappear before they’re ready to lose it. It’s a reality of life and as much as humankind has experienced that loss for thousands of years, we never seem to get any better at accepting it or planning for it.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Some things make no sense whatsoever though. Processor architectures only matter because CPU companies can't just add their competitors' ISA to their own chips. Nividia and Transmeta experimented with processors that contained all the features necessary for x86 or ARM support and then simply used a software JIT to convert ARM and x86 to an internal VLIW architecture. Translation from one instruction set to another is already a solved problem. The real problems are that some architectures are fundamentally different e.g. the memory model in x86 vs ARM. You can solve it by simply including both memory models in your universal CPU. The only thing that is standing in the way of this are the darn patents.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    > Transmeta ...was slow.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  Counterexample: today you can run 25 years old Windows software which was made in the time of Windows 95.
  - Corrado 6y ago
    Yes, Windows has made a reputation for backwards compatibility and it works surprisingly well. However, it's not perfect and it only goes so far. I know there are a lot of companies out there still running Windows 95 because their software doesn't work on more advanced versions. Also, what have Microsoft given up for this compatibility? Its my understanding that Windows source code is a huge mess which has made updating it a large project. Just look at the control panel for the most recent version of Windows; it's a mish-mash of styles and layouts.

by Jetrel 6y ago

freehunter 6y ago

I am sympathetic, don’t get me wrong, but this isn’t the only industry and this isn’t the only time this has happened. It happens every day in every industry and has been happening forever and will continue to happen forever. The old example is buggy whips, someone might have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making or collecting whips for horses only to have thar investment disappear when cars came around. Or making/collecting spears just as the Roman army switched to swords. Or medieval turnip farmers when suddenly everyone wanted to eat the newly discovered potato. Or people who bought all their favorite movies on Betamax and can’t easily watch them anymore. There are very few creators who actually create the things they rely on to create, ultimately we are all consumers even inside our professions. And like any consumer, we are all at the mercy of a market we don’t control. Either you have to accept that everything must come to an end and plan for that eventual end, or you have to dig deeper into your creativity. Everyone has something they rely on that will disappear before they’re ready to lose it. It’s a reality of life and as much as humankind has experienced that loss for thousands of years, we never seem to get any better at accepting it or planning for it.

imtringued 6y ago
Some things make no sense whatsoever though. Processor architectures only matter because CPU companies can't just add their competitors' ISA to their own chips. Nividia and Transmeta experimented with processors that contained all the features necessary for x86 or ARM support and then simply used a software JIT to convert ARM and x86 to an internal VLIW architecture. Translation from one instruction set to another is already a solved problem. The real problems are that some architectures are fundamentally different e.g. the memory model in x86 vs ARM. You can solve it by simply including both memory models in your universal CPU. The only thing that is standing in the way of this are the darn patents.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  > Transmeta ...was slow.
DeathArrow 6y ago
Counterexample: today you can run 25 years old Windows software which was made in the time of Windows 95.
- Corrado 6y ago
  Yes, Windows has made a reputation for backwards compatibility and it works surprisingly well. However, it's not perfect and it only goes so far. I know there are a lot of companies out there still running Windows 95 because their software doesn't work on more advanced versions. Also, what have Microsoft given up for this compatibility? Its my understanding that Windows source code is a huge mess which has made updating it a large project. Just look at the control panel for the most recent version of Windows; it's a mish-mash of styles and layouts.