If you want your software to last remember that you also have to have a working and upto date development environment, ie your code may still work fine but if y

If you want your software to last remember that you also have to have a working and upto date development environment, ie your code may still work fine but if you cannot compile it to the correct target it is useless. I found this out the hard way when I had to recompile some fpga firmware for a $100K piece of equipment which used a programmer not supported by windows, a chip and code not supported by the current IDE and a binary blob which we did not have the source code for and would not link, luckily we winged it by replacing the FPGA with a hardware compatible replacement... We now preserve the whole development environment on a VM and save it with the source code.