6 ms·

I am so glad it does. During my PhD, I had to maintain a very old stack of software (about 1 million lines of C++ on top of 300,000 of Fortran). It was not pos

by Loic 4y ago

I am so glad it does. During my PhD, I had to maintain a very old stack of software (about 1 million lines of C++ on top of 300,000 of Fortran). It was not possible to compile it with something different than Windows 2000, it was not possible to upgrade the MFC version and all the old compilers. It was basically stuck in time but with a very high value for the end-users and our research group had not the bandwidth to upgrade. Microsoft was nice with us and kept the compatibility and still keep the compatibility 20 years later! I am using Linux as my daily driver, but I must say, Microsoft is the king of backward compatibility. A feeling of "compile once, run forever on Windows".

ciphol 4y ago
I think Linux is the king of backwards compatibility, in that you can always download an old version of Linux and run your old software stack. Windows forces you to use a new version; Microsoft puts a lot of effort into backwards compatibility but it's always a gamble.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  Pros and cons. I'd rather have old software run on a new OS and hardware. Than access to old OS and hardware to run the software. Simply because that means you're not reliant on obselete hardware (expensive poor performance hard to find) and potentially a OS full of security holes. Similarly I'd rather have to use a VM at compile than run time. For convenience.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  Where I'm from, you can still easily buy a Windows XP license. I've also seen a win2k license maybe about a year ago. Should have bought the box for nostalgic purposes when I had the chance now that I think of it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    MSDN still lets you download Windows 3.11; though I presume it's not licensed for "real use".
  - eppp 4y ago
    Where can I get a legit license for XP that will activate?
- teh_klev 4y ago
  > in that you can always download an old version of Linux and run your old software stack. That's not really what's meant by backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility generally means your current OS can run your old software without having to install a raft of older (and likely insecure) versions. Windows accumulates backwards compatibility "hacks" over time meaning you likely have a fairly decent chance of running your older software where vendors misused API's in ways they ought not to have. Of course there are the usual caveats about running 16bit apps on 64 bit Windows where you'll need to find a 16bit emulator. > Windows forces you to use a new version It doesn't. If you were running Windows 7 or 8 on the cusp of the Windows 10 roll out, that 20-25 year old app will still run on the currently supported versions of Windows. The "hacks" for that ancient app you still know and love will still be there. Now there are some far away and yet undiscovered edge cases, as in really exotically and mythically rare that yes their hacks might only appear in a future version of Windows.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Will that old version of Linux be able to run on a modern computer with working drivers for all the hardware? Backwards compatibility means that you can use the current OS with the current drivers and still run the old software.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    ... and will you dare put it on a network, with the unpatched security CVEs?
chrisseaton 4y ago
> It was not possible to compile it with something different than Windows 2000 How does software get that bad?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Windows 2000 was a major platform for 5+ years, so if you have a development environment on it and never moved it elsewhere, there will be lots of assumptions built-in. As the OP mentioned they didn't have _time_ to fix it; likely 80% of the problems are hard-coded paths and such that would be relatively easy to "fix" - but the other 20% may be dependencies on things that got deprecated/removed in later versions of the build environment, and updating would take quite a bit of work. This is one of the reasons that if you are trying to build cross-platform software (and Windows 2000/XP/98/Vista is cross platform, mind you) you should start building and testing on the various platforms early.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > if you are trying to build cross-platform software (and Windows 2000/XP/98/Vista is cross platform, mind you) you should start building and testing on the various platforms early. Yeah people tell me they're having problems migrating their Java 8 app to something modern and I can't understand why haven't they always been running all versions of Java in CI, including pre-releases, and just fixing the one thing a month that pops up as a problem. They can still run on Java 8, but they will know it's going to work fine everywhere, and if they find something that won't work in a future version they can engage the Java developers before they release it.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      People do some of that, but Java 8 is in that weird state where it is Java for so many things that moving off of it can be incredibly hard. It took Mojang/Microsoft how many years to get Minecraft working on something that wasn't Java 8? And that doesn't even cover the changes in the versions of Java 8 itself that break things - one even had to be reverted IIRC.
intsunny 4y ago
> I am so glad it does. [...] I completely reject preserving backwards compatibility for the sake of application bugs. Why should Microsoft produce a hack for a particular piece of software? That software might be used by a 10s, 100s, 1000s of people for a certain amount of time, whereas Windows itself impacts billions of people daily and will continue to do so for decades to come. At some point the programmers, PMs, and maybe even the bug tracker behind these hacks will move on. Institutional knowledge is rarely forever. A newer generation of developers, PM, etc, will have to waste time understanding the bug, and deciding to support it or not. Possibly without ever knowing if the software in question has moved on itself, or is even in use anymore. Say what you want about Apple, but rarely the words "badly aged" or "crufty" are used to describe their ecosystems. They are the stunning definition of darwinism at its finest.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Being able to run software is what makes a computer valuable. If you constantly break software, the computer is useless. Fortunately nowadays we have more resources to throw at the problem and can run such software in containers, VMs, or other such isolated sub-environments when necessary, but that wasn't always the case.
- coldpie 4y ago
  And as a result, Apple platform developers have to tell their customers that Apple is breaking their stuff: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6EF https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6... which certainly doesn't earn them goodwill among the dev community. It's a trade-off, I don't think you can declare one strategy better than the other in absolute terms.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Microsoft has a systematic approach to applying these hacks so its less expensive for them to maintain them than it would be otherwise. For instance they changed the implementation of malloc() between Win95 and Win2k that broke some applications that depended on the behavior of the old malloc() so there is a flag in the system for those applications that restores the old malloc().
madushan1000 4y ago
Linux has a rule to "never break the userland". So if you maintain your own userland(libc/gui libs, etc..) even the latest kernel will run your old software.
- chasil 4y ago
  The 32-bit Oracle 8i database will no longer run on modern Linux. I forget the exact errors, but the software is simply too old. I was also around for the tail end of the libc5 to glibc conversion, so I have definitely seen breaking change.
  - stevewatson301 4y ago
    glibc != kernel
    - bombcar 4y ago
      True, but users don't care why it breaks, only that it does, and most people consider "the distro" to be Linux. So you probably CAN get old Oracle databases to run on the latest kernel, but all the supporting software would be a weird mishmash of old libraries, etc.
      - chungy 4y ago
        Alternatively: Just run it in a container using whatever version of whatever distro it did work on. One doesn't need to make a mess of their host OS anymore.
        bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, much of why VMWare became a big hit was "you can virtualize your weird Windows NT application and not have to maintain a Windows NT machine".
        chungy 4y ago
throwaway09223 4y ago
> "Microsoft is the king of backward compatibility." The thing is, this hasn't been true for a long time. At this point Wine/dosbox are far more compatible with old weird software than the current version of windows. For example, you can't run 16bit Windows programs at all on Windows. You even have projects like otvdvm, running wine on windows to support older programs (or dosbox, which I think everyone is a lot more familiar with). http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html The genuine article tends to be better while older platforms are supported, but at some point, inevitably, older platforms are dropped because supporting them costs money. When that happens, open source imitations end up with better support than the original.
- itsmartapuntocm 4y ago
  NTVDM and DOS/16-bit compatibility only died with the death of 32-bit Windows with 11. I'd say 40 or so years of backwards compatibility is pretty good.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    It is really good. I'm not complaining! But -- the OSS world is even better in the very long term.
    - thereddaikon 4y ago
      It is and isn't. Really old stuff seems to work well. But just old stuff more often than not is unworkable. There's a serious issue in the Linux world with distros going down and software disappearing over time.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Forcing you to use 32-bit windows hasn't counted as proper support since at least the release of windows 7. And more relevant is when people stopped releasing mainstream 16-bit programs, which is much much later when you consider all the 16-bit installers.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
I think you will find this one amusing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158687
Aaargh20318 4y ago
> It was basically stuck in time but with a very high value for the end-users I wonder why it wasn't properly maintained if it was such a valuable piece of software ? I assume they perform regular maintenance on all other high-value property they own ?
- Someone 4y ago
  The OP also said “During my PhD, I” I would guesstimate that software 100% was ‘maintained’ by PhD students with x years of funding in which they 1) had to get their thesis done. 2) had to get their thesis done. 3) etc. Spending a few months to make life easier for your successors just isn’t worth it. And yes, it might be worth it at the start of your PhD, but then, you don’t know the software well enough to dare embark on such a journey. Also, it’s quite possible none of those PhD students had decent schooling in software engineering.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  lol. lmao even. You even worked for a company that was not in software or IT? "If it works, why change it?"
jlarocco 4y ago
It's not quite as easy, but in a case like that I prefer to run the software in a VM using the version of Linux it was designed for. Lets you keep "compile once, run forever" without crippling the rest of your software to support ancient or broken APIs.

by Loic 4y ago

ciphol 4y ago

I think Linux is the king of backwards compatibility, in that you can always download an old version of Linux and run your old software stack. Windows forces you to use a new version; Microsoft puts a lot of effort into backwards compatibility but it's always a gamble.

psychphysic 4y ago
Pros and cons. I'd rather have old software run on a new OS and hardware. Than access to old OS and hardware to run the software. Simply because that means you're not reliant on obselete hardware (expensive poor performance hard to find) and potentially a OS full of security holes. Similarly I'd rather have to use a VM at compile than run time. For convenience.
5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
Where I'm from, you can still easily buy a Windows XP license. I've also seen a win2k license maybe about a year ago. Should have bought the box for nostalgic purposes when I had the chance now that I think of it.
- bombcar 4y ago
  MSDN still lets you download Windows 3.11; though I presume it's not licensed for "real use".
- eppp 4y ago
  Where can I get a legit license for XP that will activate?
teh_klev 4y ago
> in that you can always download an old version of Linux and run your old software stack. That's not really what's meant by backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility generally means your current OS can run your old software without having to install a raft of older (and likely insecure) versions. Windows accumulates backwards compatibility "hacks" over time meaning you likely have a fairly decent chance of running your older software where vendors misused API's in ways they ought not to have. Of course there are the usual caveats about running 16bit apps on 64 bit Windows where you'll need to find a 16bit emulator. > Windows forces you to use a new version It doesn't. If you were running Windows 7 or 8 on the cusp of the Windows 10 roll out, that 20-25 year old app will still run on the currently supported versions of Windows. The "hacks" for that ancient app you still know and love will still be there. Now there are some far away and yet undiscovered edge cases, as in really exotically and mythically rare that yes their hacks might only appear in a future version of Windows.
PeterisP 4y ago
Will that old version of Linux be able to run on a modern computer with working drivers for all the hardware? Backwards compatibility means that you can use the current OS with the current drivers and still run the old software.
- kazinator 4y ago
  ... and will you dare put it on a network, with the unpatched security CVEs?

chrisseaton 4y ago

> It was not possible to compile it with something different than Windows 2000 How does software get that bad?

bombcar 4y ago
Windows 2000 was a major platform for 5+ years, so if you have a development environment on it and never moved it elsewhere, there will be lots of assumptions built-in. As the OP mentioned they didn't have _time_ to fix it; likely 80% of the problems are hard-coded paths and such that would be relatively easy to "fix" - but the other 20% may be dependencies on things that got deprecated/removed in later versions of the build environment, and updating would take quite a bit of work. This is one of the reasons that if you are trying to build cross-platform software (and Windows 2000/XP/98/Vista is cross platform, mind you) you should start building and testing on the various platforms early.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > if you are trying to build cross-platform software (and Windows 2000/XP/98/Vista is cross platform, mind you) you should start building and testing on the various platforms early. Yeah people tell me they're having problems migrating their Java 8 app to something modern and I can't understand why haven't they always been running all versions of Java in CI, including pre-releases, and just fixing the one thing a month that pops up as a problem. They can still run on Java 8, but they will know it's going to work fine everywhere, and if they find something that won't work in a future version they can engage the Java developers before they release it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    People do some of that, but Java 8 is in that weird state where it is Java for so many things that moving off of it can be incredibly hard. It took Mojang/Microsoft how many years to get Minecraft working on something that wasn't Java 8? And that doesn't even cover the changes in the versions of Java 8 itself that break things - one even had to be reverted IIRC.

intsunny 4y ago

> I am so glad it does. [...] I completely reject preserving backwards compatibility for the sake of application bugs. Why should Microsoft produce a hack for a particular piece of software? That software might be used by a 10s, 100s, 1000s of people for a certain amount of time, whereas Windows itself impacts billions of people daily and will continue to do so for decades to come. At some point the programmers, PMs, and maybe even the bug tracker behind these hacks will move on. Institutional knowledge is rarely forever. A newer generation of developers, PM, etc, will have to waste time understanding the bug, and deciding to support it or not. Possibly without ever knowing if the software in question has moved on itself, or is even in use anymore. Say what you want about Apple, but rarely the words "badly aged" or "crufty" are used to describe their ecosystems. They are the stunning definition of darwinism at its finest.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Being able to run software is what makes a computer valuable. If you constantly break software, the computer is useless. Fortunately nowadays we have more resources to throw at the problem and can run such software in containers, VMs, or other such isolated sub-environments when necessary, but that wasn't always the case.
coldpie 4y ago
And as a result, Apple platform developers have to tell their customers that Apple is breaking their stuff: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6EF https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6... which certainly doesn't earn them goodwill among the dev community. It's a trade-off, I don't think you can declare one strategy better than the other in absolute terms.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Microsoft has a systematic approach to applying these hacks so its less expensive for them to maintain them than it would be otherwise. For instance they changed the implementation of malloc() between Win95 and Win2k that broke some applications that depended on the behavior of the old malloc() so there is a flag in the system for those applications that restores the old malloc().

madushan1000 4y ago

Linux has a rule to "never break the userland". So if you maintain your own userland(libc/gui libs, etc..) even the latest kernel will run your old software.

chasil 4y ago
The 32-bit Oracle 8i database will no longer run on modern Linux. I forget the exact errors, but the software is simply too old. I was also around for the tail end of the libc5 to glibc conversion, so I have definitely seen breaking change.
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  glibc != kernel
  - bombcar 4y ago
    True, but users don't care why it breaks, only that it does, and most people consider "the distro" to be Linux. So you probably CAN get old Oracle databases to run on the latest kernel, but all the supporting software would be a weird mishmash of old libraries, etc.
    - chungy 4y ago
      Alternatively: Just run it in a container using whatever version of whatever distro it did work on. One doesn't need to make a mess of their host OS anymore.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, much of why VMWare became a big hit was "you can virtualize your weird Windows NT application and not have to maintain a Windows NT machine".
        chungy 4y ago

throwaway09223 4y ago

> "Microsoft is the king of backward compatibility." The thing is, this hasn't been true for a long time. At this point Wine/dosbox are far more compatible with old weird software than the current version of windows. For example, you can't run 16bit Windows programs at all on Windows. You even have projects like otvdvm, running wine on windows to support older programs (or dosbox, which I think everyone is a lot more familiar with). http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/otvdm.html The genuine article tends to be better while older platforms are supported, but at some point, inevitably, older platforms are dropped because supporting them costs money. When that happens, open source imitations end up with better support than the original.

itsmartapuntocm 4y ago
NTVDM and DOS/16-bit compatibility only died with the death of 32-bit Windows with 11. I'd say 40 or so years of backwards compatibility is pretty good.
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  It is really good. I'm not complaining! But -- the OSS world is even better in the very long term.
  - thereddaikon 4y ago
    It is and isn't. Really old stuff seems to work well. But just old stuff more often than not is unworkable. There's a serious issue in the Linux world with distros going down and software disappearing over time.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Forcing you to use 32-bit windows hasn't counted as proper support since at least the release of windows 7. And more relevant is when people stopped releasing mainstream 16-bit programs, which is much much later when you consider all the 16-bit installers.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

I think you will find this one amusing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33158687

Aaargh20318 4y ago

> It was basically stuck in time but with a very high value for the end-users I wonder why it wasn't properly maintained if it was such a valuable piece of software ? I assume they perform regular maintenance on all other high-value property they own ?

Someone 4y ago
The OP also said “During my PhD, I” I would guesstimate that software 100% was ‘maintained’ by PhD students with x years of funding in which they 1) had to get their thesis done. 2) had to get their thesis done. 3) etc. Spending a few months to make life easier for your successors just isn’t worth it. And yes, it might be worth it at the start of your PhD, but then, you don’t know the software well enough to dare embark on such a journey. Also, it’s quite possible none of those PhD students had decent schooling in software engineering.
rejectfinite 4y ago
lol. lmao even. You even worked for a company that was not in software or IT? "If it works, why change it?"

jlarocco 4y ago

It's not quite as easy, but in a case like that I prefer to run the software in a VM using the version of Linux it was designed for. Lets you keep "compile once, run forever" without crippling the rest of your software to support ancient or broken APIs.