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That's because you lack imagination, you lack knowledge about how we've gotten to where we are, and you lack understanding about the value of keeping software p
by johnklos 4y ago
That's because you lack imagination, you lack knowledge about how we've gotten to where we are, and you lack understanding about the value of keeping software portable.
There are many, many reasons for maintaining support for alternate architectures. How many problems would be baked in if we always had this attitude?
Back in the day when "all the world is an i386", people complained when told about how their code has bugs when compiled on 64 bit processors. Imagine if we had baked in all of those 32-bit-centric bugs that broke compiling on 64 bit.
People do the same thing now when told their code doesn't compile cleanly on 32 bit, on PowerPC, on ARM, on big endian, et cetera. Imagine if we now acted like "all the world is an amd64", and lots of code was simply broken on aarch64?
If you were alive and paid attention through other transitions, you'd understand how every example of programmers being "forced" to care about the correctness and portability of their code has paid dividends years later.
- Dylan16807 4y agoYou're arguing a very different point. Linux supports a whole lot of architectures that are in active use, and nobody is suggesting changing that.
- ryao 4y agoEvidently, m68k is still in use, otherwise the recent change would not have been noticed.
- jabl 4y agoIndeed. The kernel isn't a museum, code or architectures that aren't used can and will get dropped. But the converse is also true, if somebody steps up to regularly test and fix issues in some code it can stay. Even if said somebody happens to be a bunch of retrocomputing enthusiasts and not a zillion dollar corporation.
- Dylan16807 4y agoHow many users do you think there are? I put "active" in there to contrast from a small/legacy amount. Though I wasn't making a definitive statement on which category m68k belongs to in the first place.
- Karellen 4y ago> Back in the day when "all the world is an i386", If anyone wants a further back in an even earlier day example, see http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/V/vaxocentrism.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/V/vaxocentrism.html
- loeg 4y agoLinux would still be a portable kernel if it dropped m68k support. It still targets PPC, ARM, x86, Sparc, avr, ia64, s390, blah blah blah. Dropping m68k is a far cry from dropping everything except amd64.