6 ms·

Wow, until now I thought Microsoft were the kings of absurd dedication to backwards compatibility. Of course credit goes to Intel here, because they're the one

by mark-r 4y ago

Wow, until now I thought Microsoft were the kings of absurd dedication to backwards compatibility. Of course credit goes to Intel here, because they're the ones that retained that 8080 behavior even in their latest x86 chips.

anyfoo 4y ago
Microsoft and Intel have been sharing that throne for a long time. Look up the A20 Gate for another detail that illustrates how dedicated Intel is (or at least was) to backwards compatibility.
philistine 4y ago
Microsoft is the king in another way. Apple has made Rosetta 2, one of the most impressive software/hardware mixture ever, and they can’t wait to get rid of it. Microsoft will make a crappy conversion shim and keep it in their code forever. For. Ever.
- TheCondor 4y ago
  +1 to this.
- StillBored 4y ago
  I know, its almost like the job of an operating system is to run the programs their users have, rather than just churning the innovation wheel at the expensive of the users who have to replacing perfectly working solutions. This is such a BS take, the nice thing with opensource is that you can go look at the commits that say remove windows 7 support from python. And pretty much anyone who isn't a child can see its less a technical move, and more political. Because out of a million line codebase those half dozen lines were causing so much grief. Frankly, all this "we have to remove legacy ports" and "legacy code" is some kind of OCD levels of mental illness.
  - philistine 4y ago
    There is such a thing as technical debt. Apple couldn't have gotten so much performance with Rosetta 2 if it had to support 32-bit code. By dropping 32-bit support a year before the transition, they forced everyone to drop their last vestiges of old code. When the ARM transition then happened, it was smoother for everyone. That you have to call this approach a mental illness is poor criticism.
    - StillBored 4y ago
      or maybe they could have just said, 32-bit programs will be slower... Technical debt is when people make a mess, its perfectly possible to clean that mess without breaking ABIs. Particularly in OS's where the ABIs tend to be decoupled from the underlying code by abstraction layers. For example you can swap the filesystem in use and still maintain the behavior. Linux's syscall ABI has been basically static for decades, its only the userspace layers that don't try and adhear to those levels of compatibility. PS: We like to give apple all this credit for having a "fast" machine, but the real question should be, if it can't solve the problem I have, does it matter how fast it is? Mac's for the vast majority of the people I see using them are basically trendy chromebooks, where the users are spending 99% of their time in safari. So its probably a good choice for apple if that is the user base they are interested in.
      - einherjae 4y ago
        Can’t solve which problem?
        wmf 4y ago
        Running old apps.
        GeekyBear 4y ago
        You run them in a virtual machine running an older version of the OS, the same way you do with legacy Windows apps that won't work on modern versions of Windows.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > they can’t wait to get rid of it Apple developed the 68k emulator used in PowerPC Macs in-house, and never removed it. Apple licensed Rosetta from Transitive at a time when they didn't have tens of Billions of dollars in cash lying around. Rosetta 2 was developed in-house, but even if they were still paying a licensing fee every time they shipped a new OS version, it wouldn't even be a rounding error to their bottom line today. Why would they be in any rush to remove Rosetta 2 at all?
  - wmf 4y ago
    10.5 dropped Classic but continued to support PowerPC. 32-bit was also dropped at some point. Rosetta 2 will be deprecated one day.
  - yborg 4y ago
    Why is Apple cramming advertising into every first party application they have when they are insanely profitable? They'll drop Rosetta 2 as soon as they are off Intel to not have to pay for staff to maintain it.
  - MikeRichardson 4y ago
    Apple could not remove the 68K emulator from the Classic Mac OS, because the Classic Mac OS was never fully ported to PowerPC.
    - blakespot 4y ago
      Indeed. I recall reading, in the end, that some 90+% of the code had been converted shortly before OS X became the mainstay.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    > Why would they be in any rush to remove Rosetta 2 at all? Due to the belief that any backwards compatibility comes at the cost of a higher difficulty moving forwards, I suppose. There will probably come a time in which a new feature will collide with this compatibility layer and I have little doubt that the compatibility layer will lose.
  - 4y ago
- becurious 4y ago
  You’re going to love the ARM64EC ABI target on Windows.

by mark-r 4y ago

anyfoo 4y ago

Microsoft and Intel have been sharing that throne for a long time. Look up the A20 Gate for another detail that illustrates how dedicated Intel is (or at least was) to backwards compatibility.

philistine 4y ago

Microsoft is the king in another way. Apple has made Rosetta 2, one of the most impressive software/hardware mixture ever, and they can’t wait to get rid of it. Microsoft will make a crappy conversion shim and keep it in their code forever. For. Ever.

TheCondor 4y ago
+1 to this.
StillBored 4y ago
I know, its almost like the job of an operating system is to run the programs their users have, rather than just churning the innovation wheel at the expensive of the users who have to replacing perfectly working solutions. This is such a BS take, the nice thing with opensource is that you can go look at the commits that say remove windows 7 support from python. And pretty much anyone who isn't a child can see its less a technical move, and more political. Because out of a million line codebase those half dozen lines were causing so much grief. Frankly, all this "we have to remove legacy ports" and "legacy code" is some kind of OCD levels of mental illness.
- philistine 4y ago
  There is such a thing as technical debt. Apple couldn't have gotten so much performance with Rosetta 2 if it had to support 32-bit code. By dropping 32-bit support a year before the transition, they forced everyone to drop their last vestiges of old code. When the ARM transition then happened, it was smoother for everyone. That you have to call this approach a mental illness is poor criticism.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    or maybe they could have just said, 32-bit programs will be slower... Technical debt is when people make a mess, its perfectly possible to clean that mess without breaking ABIs. Particularly in OS's where the ABIs tend to be decoupled from the underlying code by abstraction layers. For example you can swap the filesystem in use and still maintain the behavior. Linux's syscall ABI has been basically static for decades, its only the userspace layers that don't try and adhear to those levels of compatibility. PS: We like to give apple all this credit for having a "fast" machine, but the real question should be, if it can't solve the problem I have, does it matter how fast it is? Mac's for the vast majority of the people I see using them are basically trendy chromebooks, where the users are spending 99% of their time in safari. So its probably a good choice for apple if that is the user base they are interested in.
    - einherjae 4y ago
      Can’t solve which problem?
      - wmf 4y ago
        Running old apps.
        GeekyBear 4y ago
        You run them in a virtual machine running an older version of the OS, the same way you do with legacy Windows apps that won't work on modern versions of Windows.
GeekyBear 4y ago
> they can’t wait to get rid of it Apple developed the 68k emulator used in PowerPC Macs in-house, and never removed it. Apple licensed Rosetta from Transitive at a time when they didn't have tens of Billions of dollars in cash lying around. Rosetta 2 was developed in-house, but even if they were still paying a licensing fee every time they shipped a new OS version, it wouldn't even be a rounding error to their bottom line today. Why would they be in any rush to remove Rosetta 2 at all?
- wmf 4y ago
  10.5 dropped Classic but continued to support PowerPC. 32-bit was also dropped at some point. Rosetta 2 will be deprecated one day.
- yborg 4y ago
  Why is Apple cramming advertising into every first party application they have when they are insanely profitable? They'll drop Rosetta 2 as soon as they are off Intel to not have to pay for staff to maintain it.
- MikeRichardson 4y ago
  Apple could not remove the 68K emulator from the Classic Mac OS, because the Classic Mac OS was never fully ported to PowerPC.
  - blakespot 4y ago
    Indeed. I recall reading, in the end, that some 90+% of the code had been converted shortly before OS X became the mainstay.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  > Why would they be in any rush to remove Rosetta 2 at all? Due to the belief that any backwards compatibility comes at the cost of a higher difficulty moving forwards, I suppose. There will probably come a time in which a new feature will collide with this compatibility layer and I have little doubt that the compatibility layer will lose.
- 4y ago
becurious 4y ago
You’re going to love the ARM64EC ABI target on Windows.