5 ms·

Are we sure they didn't just lose the source code entirely?

• rightbyte 3y ago
  Probably unbuildable anyways without a lot of effort if you can't recreate the workstation that was building it.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    These days you'd save a VM image, but if we all move off x86, what good will that do?
    • Moomoomoo309 3y ago
      QEMU can run VMs that are a different architecture than the host. There's obviously a performance penalty to doing that, but it can be done.
    • michaelt 3y ago
      These days you'd save a VM image, in case you need to rebuild the code in 20 years. Then in 20 years you boot up the image and find you can't log in because your cloud Windows account was deleted 10 years ago for inactivity, your build toolchain is too outdated to download artefacts, the vendor of your text-padding library deleted it in a fit of pique, your code-signing certificates have expired, the guy whose cell phone is on the corporate account 2FA left the company 15 years ago, the OS vendor won't allow new releases to use those obsolete, deprecated APIs.....
• jamesfinlayson 3y ago
  You'd hope not, but it could be backed on something like a tape drive: too much effort to retrieve and then access.