> Good point about Java, even though talking to KVMs over the network and displaying a GUI isn't really hardware stuff. If it's over the network (using IP sock

> Good point about Java, even though talking to KVMs over the network and displaying a GUI isn't really hardware stuff. If it's over the network (using IP sockets), Java can do it just fine and what I wrote about downwards compatibility applies. Same if it's a Swing GUI, which is part of the standard API. Admittedly, Swing is the area where I once witnessed a real bug caused by version incompatibility; IIRC code made some assumptions about undocumented behaviour in event handling, which caused an endless loop on a newer JVM. As for portable C, I have very limited experience really working with C, but remember trying to get some tarballs to compile and having big problems with fragile autoconf scripts.