3 ms·
Someone’s gonna come and say that linux has that too, and while technically true it’s quite hard in practice. The kernel abi is stable, everything else is pure
by znpy 3y ago
Someone’s gonna come and say that linux has that too, and while technically true it’s quite hard in practice.
The kernel abi is stable, everything else is pure chaos, and this is mostly due to how applications are usually packaged in linux: your app could load (as long as it’s not in a.out format) but then would fail at loading most libraries. So effectively you need a whole chroot with the reference linux distro (or other runtime in general) and I’m not so sure you could find archives of 30 years old distros.
And I’m assuming that the kernel abi hasn’t actually changed a single bit and that no other interfaces changed either (stuff like /proc or /sys - /sys wasn’t even there 30 years ago i think).
And if you’re running an Xorg app, I wouldn’t bet my lunch on that level of protocol-level compatibility.
- msla 3y agoIt works in Linux the same way it works on Windows: If you don't have the dynamic libraries and configuration you need, it won't work. Why this is a mark against Linux and not Windows is beyond me.
- znpy 3y agoEh, kinda. On linux you can only assume kernel abi compatibility whereas pn windoes you can assume the basic runtime (win32 or whatever) to be present and available.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoIn the timeframes this post is talking about, you can practically do the same in any operating system. What "basic runtime" could such an aged Linux binary use, other than glibc and Xlib/motif, which are precisely the ones which have been actually trying to preserve ABI? These 30 year old binaries have a higher change of working than week old ones... This is similar to the fact that Office 95 will work on recent Windows, but Office 2k won't.
- sedatk 3y agoMicrosoft keeps maintaining all those libraries, and keeps them in the OS by default. That may not be the case with Linux.