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No one wants to maintain backward compatibility for decades with computer architectures no one actually uses anymore. There are more innovative, exciting things
by bitwize 4y ago
No one wants to maintain backward compatibility for decades with computer architectures no one actually uses anymore. There are more innovative, exciting things to work on.
Big endian is so dead, you can literally design a binary network protocol that has all fields 64-bit aligned, little endian, slurp the packets into a buffer, cast the buffer to a struct, and be fine across ALL architectures you'll likely run in production.
This, by the way, is why X11 itself is slowly bit-rotting into irrelevance also: no one wants to maintain it. Most of the protocol exists strictly for legacy applications -- modern ones use the X server as a framebuffer compositor and that's it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoThe great thing is that if you actually follow this logic you never need to care; nobody uses anything but Windows for graphical applications anyways, so X11 (and Wayland, incidentally) is irrelevant in all cases. Or... did you mean to suggest that your niche platform matters but not this other niche platform?
- chlorion 4y agoI understand where you are coming from, but I think at the end of the day, if there are people on $platform who are willing to contribute, that's all that actually matters. If there aren't enough users, there will be nobody to support it, so it dies. In other words, it not about how much one platform "matters" over another to some users. We can't expect people to work for free to support our platforms with no benefit to them. If you really care, I guess donate some hardware, or pay some developer to work on this, or provide support yourself! I know that sounds rude but it is what it comes down to. It seems like in this specific case X11 will still support whatever exactly this feature is but will put it behind a config option. The idea above applies in general to open source work though.