4 ms·

Isn’t this something that Windows and MacOS have done repeatedly, and managed via compatibility layers?

• turminal 5y ago
  Compatibility layers are cheaper if you are a company with thousands of programmers.
  • musicale 5y ago
    Compatibility layers (or any development activities) are cheaper (for you) if you don't pay your developers.
    • bch 5y ago
      I apologize if “if you don’t pay NetBSD developers compatibility is cheap(er)” isn’t what you meant; perhaps I misinterpreted. NetBSD development is not cheap - it’s accomplishments are hard fought design and implementation wins largely performed by talented volunteers. To me “cheap” in this context implies a certain ease, which I don’t think is a fair characterization of what happens with the project. Then again, maybe I’m just being hypersensitive about respect for the project.
• musicale 5y ago
  Apple has created a number of Mac compatibility layers (68K emulation, Classic, Carbon, PPC Emulation in Rosetta 1, x86 static translation in Rosetta 2) and the only one that is still around is Rosetta 2. 32-bit apps were also broken without any compatibility layer support. The only practical way you can run Mac programs that depended on those discontinued features and compatibility layers is on an older OS: either on old hardware, on an emulator, or in a VM. On iOS Apple hasn't really bothered with backward compatibility and is happy to break your apps every year and to offload a yearly maintenance burden onto developers. This is unfortunate because backward compatibility would have multiplicative benefit for thousands of apps and billions of iPhone users.