5 ms·

I wish more languages support old platforms. I'm working in a company and a lot of our customers are running Windows 7 and 8, few of them running Vista. I have

I wish more languages support old platforms. I'm working in a company and a lot of our customers are running Windows 7 and 8, few of them running Vista. I have to use ancient versions of development tools to target those. For example stuck on Java 8 for eternity. It's PITA.

userbinator 11mo ago
It's not hard to do either, especially on Windows where backwards-compatibility is almost completely guaranteed. Of course those in the planned obsolescence mindset would fight hard against it, because then it would be harder for us to take the good without the bad.
- carstenhag 11mo ago
  I really hate my bakery, the buns are only edible for some days, after that, they grow mold! Without sarcasm, it is entirely reasonable that when the OS is EOL by the 1st party, software support for it by 3rd party also ends soon after that.
  - duskdozer 11mo ago
    I think it's more like your gen1 wi-fi enabled Philips screwdriver stops working because it's EOL as opposed to because nobody uses Philps screws anymore. Sometimes it's the latter, but not always.
    - dwattttt 11mo ago
      A more direct analogy is right there; your Phillips head screws cam out more easily than Torx. Everyone who wants screws that don't shred as easily moves to that weird 6 pointed star pattern, and your Phillips head screwdrivers are suddenly EOL'd.
  - tcfhgj 11mo ago
    Unlike buns, software doesn't deteriorate
    - purkka 11mo ago
      It does, especially at the scale of operating systems. Bugs and vulnerabilities are always being found, with fewer and fewer people in the pool that might even theoretically want to pay for fixing them. Also, hardware does deteriorate, and the story is the same for adding software support for whatever is currently available in hardware.
      - tcfhgj 11mo ago
        > Bugs and vulnerabilities are always being found none which haven't been there from the beginning
vips7L 11mo ago
I’m a huge Java fan, modern versions are amazing, but being stuck on 8 is the only time I’d recommend just using Kotlin or Scala and compiling to v8 byte code. 8 is just a miserable experience.
- tapete2 11mo ago
  Do you happen to know some good learning resources (books, etc.) for modern Java versions? My last job used Java 8 exclusively and it was indeed a miserable experience, but I am contemplating using modern java for my next project.
  - vips7L 11mo ago
    This is unpublished still but is worth checking out: https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-java https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-j... Other than that, I think we’re all waiting for Josh Bloch to put out Effective Java 4th edition. The main benefits of the post-8 world that I would look into learning are: pattern matching and destructuring, sealed (sum) types, records, and switch expressions. In the library/framework space I think learning about quarkus, microprofile, and jakarta data would be valuable. It’s looking like that’s the future of Java on the server. Less important things to learn about would probably be runtime changes like virtual threads, ZGC, or the AOT cache stuff coming out of project Leyden. Long term things to keep an eye on are value classes if we ever get them.
asimovDev 11mo ago
seeing Windows 8 called old really did some psychic damage to me. If it's not a secret, what kind of customers do you have? Is it some industrial stuff as usual?
- vbezhenar 11mo ago
  Medicine. I'm living in third world country and probably they don't have enough money to upgrade often, they just install something and work with it for many years. Works for them, I guess, I often see computers with 2-4 GB RAM and some ancient Celeron.
  - dijit 11mo ago
    Not to be glib, but medical equipment in the first world is the same.
    - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
      Surely it uses MSVCRT though.
      - amiga386 11mo ago
        I can't speak for medical equipment, but lab equipment in testing labs (including the ones in hospitals) needs to be calibrated correctly and run exactly to the vendor's specifications. They will continue to sign off on old hardware they continue to support, even if it's actually a Pentium 3 running Windows 95 with the expensive lab device attached via the parallel port. If you try and switch out the host computer to something newer, the software may or may not work, but you will definitely fail your audits for changing software without the vendor's approval. For their part, the vendor supports you buying the new version of their device for a few million quid and it now runs via USB attached to a Windows 10 computer running their proprietary software.
        dwattttt 11mo ago
grishka 11mo ago
The way some language runtimes have dropped support for Windows 7 feels outright malicious.
- krior 11mo ago
  Malicious? Thats a heavy accusation.
- Ygg2 11mo ago
  Malicious? It's almost 20 years old (it will be in 2029).
  - eimrine 11mo ago
    So why the 20 years has no outcomed anything better than 7? The result is malicious.
    - Yossarrian22 11mo ago
      Define better? I’d prefer modern Debian or Ubuntu over Windows 7 any day
      - eimrine 11mo ago
        Modern Ubuntu is a laughable example with a lot of untested Rust components added just for the sake of some big corporations. Defining better OS is almost as complicated as defining better philosophy. Somebody is leftist, somebody is rightist you know what I mean. When you see what's better usually you can not unseen it. For me Woedows 7 can give: 1. years of uptime (still with regular browsing! and with using S-states!); 2. native support of god-like NTFS, all my personal backups has it; 3. better support on laptops, for example just try to ditch the UnneededD (Devuan) and you are going to say buy-buy to predictabrle S-states, stable USB performance when using multiple devices and who knows what else; 4. the best battery time among all the market; 5. some old hardware like ATI videocard can not be run on modern kernell, also some old hardware like my digital oscilloscope, my friend's digital syntheiser - all of that makes me not just use but love he Bill Gate's crap. You don't even tied to any version of your appreciated Debian. 6. A lot of industry-best software at least requires me to have Wine. Foobar as the best audio player, STDU as the best book reader, Viktoria as the best HDD tester etc. I have a terabyte of music, hundreds gigs of books and dozens of external disk drives, consuming all of that is my typical non-work activity. 7. I also still use it for my daily job which involves using Internets. No viruces gotten, no unexpected behaviour observed, just working.
archargelod 11mo ago
Languages that compile to C (e.g. Nim) are great on older systems. If a system has a working C compiler (or cross-compiler), there’s a good chance that it’ll just work. I’ve myself compiled Nim on Windows 7, Windows XP, and Haiku, and have run simple Nim programs on the C64 and GameBoy Advance.
- self_awareness 11mo ago
  Tried to use Nim with VBCC to cross-compile to Amiga, but I failed. I think Nim does some pretty heavy assumptions about the C compiler that is used to compile the generated code.
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
    Just in case you aren't in the loop, but there are gcc and llvm based Amiga cross compilers.
    - amiga386 11mo ago
      GCC cross-compiling for the Amiga is available from https://franke.ms/git/bebbo/amiga-gcc https://franke.ms/git/bebbo/amiga-gcc for a standalone toolchain, and https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug for one that requires VSCode. I'm not aware of any working LLVM solution? All I know is that LLVM supports MC680x0 as a backend, can spit out 68k-but-non-amiga-objects and some brave souls have trying to use vlink or mold to produce Amiga executables. Have you seen any working LLVM-based Amiga (680x0 in hunk format) cross-compilers in the wild?
      - actionfromafar 11mo ago
        I probably just confused m68k support with HUNK support. Maybe one could use https://github.com/BinaryMelodies/RetroLinker https://github.com/BinaryMelodies/RetroLinker
        11mo ago
david_wpg 11mo ago
Use Temurin Java 8 JDK/JRE. It's designed to be 1:1 compatible with Oracle Java.
Fulgen 11mo ago
The problem is, as usual, that some people want that support, but nobody is actually interested in helping out with that support - and that doesn't only include people willing to help out with the code, it includes things like CI. Just how the riscv targets won't be able to reach tier 1 without GH or someone else offering CI support. Rust's target tiers, while historically not as enforced as they are today, have requirements attached to them that each target has to fulfill; demoting a target or removing support isn't done for fun, but because of what the reality reflects. In Windows 7's case, support from the Tier 1 Windows target was not so much removed as it was acknowledged that the support guaranteees just didn't exist - host tools had long been dead with LLVM having removed support for running on Windows 7, and tier 1 support wasn't guaranteed without any CI to test it on. Thus support was removed, and very soon contributors popped up to maintain the win7 target which is tier 3 and accurately reflects the support gurantees of that target. (Not a jab at your situation btw, and I wish I could offer you a solution beyond the win7 target - but as it's essentially the preexisting Windows 7 support extracted into a target that matched its reality, it works quite well in practice)
- duskdozer 11mo ago
  I do wonder how much support is removed because of genuine maintenance or compatibility burden, because I've encountered enough examples where it was done solely because some target was deemed "too old" arbitrarily, even if it would still work without any modifications.
  - s1mplicissimus 11mo ago
    > even if it would still work without any modifications even in this case, maintenance burden is still real. supporting the old target often prevents you from using features/tools that make maintenance easier
  - TylerE 11mo ago
    Perhaps the best example I can think of is the whole situation InstallShield is....massive crapware and actually generated 16 bit installers way way after anyone was using 16bit PCs. Nobody notices until, I think it was W8 or W10 dropped support for running 16bit executables (something about dropping the subsystem that supported them.
BiteCode_dev 11mo ago
The question is how much are people willing to pay for this trouble. Usually industries that stick to very old system did so because they didn't want to invest resources in the migration.
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  > Usually industries that stick to very old system did so because they didn't want to invest resources in the migration. That can be the case, but there's also a lot of instance where it's not a matter of not wanting to invest, but that being stuck on an older system is the only option until a larger component also goes EOL or dies and cannot be repaired. I see this all the time in manufacturing. User control interfaces that run on Windows XP or 2k. Machine is still great, can still get parts & repair it, but the software has long ago since stopped being supported. The manufacturer isn't going to spend 6 figures to replace a machine that hasn't fully depreciated yet. In these instances, you just air gap it off and you're fine.
jonkoops 11mo ago
What kind of business are you in that you need to be able to support these platforms that have been end-of-life for quite some time? Genuine question.
- eimrine 11mo ago
  In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets. For example we still have corona-style limitations like no paying with card if the country is bombed somewhere or the businessman risks to be fined. The thing is that nobody wants to buy something more expensive than Pentium 4 or Core2duo especially because most of accounting software still does not support multithreading. So we the businessmen use to mass-buy that cheap hardware, then we install W7 as a good enough OS with no irrigating/pesky/unneeded nanny notifications. The used motherboard if dies it makes no problem, it costs $10. Believe me, the 7 is a perfect OS for self-spying to our Governments and if you want to lobby Rust into this business you have to support W7 somehow.
  - iSnow 11mo ago
    In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets. If that country happens to be Germany, it's to combat tax fraud.
    - indigo945 11mo ago
      Germany still does not generally require this. It's required if you use an electronic cash register (and only since recently), but if you don't, it's perfectly legal to just tally the money with pen and paper at the end of the business day. It's how all the small fast food restaurants do tax evasion: just scribble half of what you actually sold on the back of a napkin, and that's enough "proof" for the tax authorities. The current governing coalition has come to an agreement that electronic cash registers will be mandatory starting in 2027, but that law hasn't been passed yet.
GardenLetter27 11mo ago
Why? That effort is far better spent on developing new things and taking advantage of modern hardware. People need to upgrade. I'm surprised any machine running Vista could even use the modern web.
- cwillu 11mo ago
  People do not, in fact, need to upgrade.
- voidUpdate 11mo ago
  The only things really driving upgrades are gaming and web browsing. If you dont need to do either of those, you could probably get by with windows 9x
- officeplant 11mo ago
  Upgrade all you want, some modern machines just can't run the software needed to talk to and control old industrial, fire, medical, etc equipment. Somewhere out there is a Windows 98 machine controlling an industrial machine that will out live early posters on HN.
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
I thought the entire point of Kotlin was to allow you to write in a more modern language, and then compile to older versions of Java no? I've not kept up with Kotlin much, but I would expect it to help a little. I know uh FreePascal targets everything including the Gameboy. But then Pascal isn't super modern or sexy unfortunately.

userbinator 11mo ago

It's not hard to do either, especially on Windows where backwards-compatibility is almost completely guaranteed. Of course those in the planned obsolescence mindset would fight hard against it, because then it would be harder for us to take the good without the bad.

carstenhag 11mo ago
I really hate my bakery, the buns are only edible for some days, after that, they grow mold! Without sarcasm, it is entirely reasonable that when the OS is EOL by the 1st party, software support for it by 3rd party also ends soon after that.
- duskdozer 11mo ago
  I think it's more like your gen1 wi-fi enabled Philips screwdriver stops working because it's EOL as opposed to because nobody uses Philps screws anymore. Sometimes it's the latter, but not always.
  - dwattttt 11mo ago
    A more direct analogy is right there; your Phillips head screws cam out more easily than Torx. Everyone who wants screws that don't shred as easily moves to that weird 6 pointed star pattern, and your Phillips head screwdrivers are suddenly EOL'd.
- tcfhgj 11mo ago
  Unlike buns, software doesn't deteriorate
  - purkka 11mo ago
    It does, especially at the scale of operating systems. Bugs and vulnerabilities are always being found, with fewer and fewer people in the pool that might even theoretically want to pay for fixing them. Also, hardware does deteriorate, and the story is the same for adding software support for whatever is currently available in hardware.
    - tcfhgj 11mo ago
      > Bugs and vulnerabilities are always being found none which haven't been there from the beginning

vips7L 11mo ago

I’m a huge Java fan, modern versions are amazing, but being stuck on 8 is the only time I’d recommend just using Kotlin or Scala and compiling to v8 byte code. 8 is just a miserable experience.

tapete2 11mo ago
Do you happen to know some good learning resources (books, etc.) for modern Java versions? My last job used Java 8 exclusively and it was indeed a miserable experience, but I am contemplating using modern java for my next project.
- vips7L 11mo ago
  This is unpublished still but is worth checking out: https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-java https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-j... Other than that, I think we’re all waiting for Josh Bloch to put out Effective Java 4th edition. The main benefits of the post-8 world that I would look into learning are: pattern matching and destructuring, sealed (sum) types, records, and switch expressions. In the library/framework space I think learning about quarkus, microprofile, and jakarta data would be valuable. It’s looking like that’s the future of Java on the server. Less important things to learn about would probably be runtime changes like virtual threads, ZGC, or the AOT cache stuff coming out of project Leyden. Long term things to keep an eye on are value classes if we ever get them.

asimovDev 11mo ago

seeing Windows 8 called old really did some psychic damage to me. If it's not a secret, what kind of customers do you have? Is it some industrial stuff as usual?

vbezhenar 11mo ago
Medicine. I'm living in third world country and probably they don't have enough money to upgrade often, they just install something and work with it for many years. Works for them, I guess, I often see computers with 2-4 GB RAM and some ancient Celeron.
- dijit 11mo ago
  Not to be glib, but medical equipment in the first world is the same.
  - inferiorhuman 11mo ago
    Surely it uses MSVCRT though.
    - amiga386 11mo ago
      I can't speak for medical equipment, but lab equipment in testing labs (including the ones in hospitals) needs to be calibrated correctly and run exactly to the vendor's specifications. They will continue to sign off on old hardware they continue to support, even if it's actually a Pentium 3 running Windows 95 with the expensive lab device attached via the parallel port. If you try and switch out the host computer to something newer, the software may or may not work, but you will definitely fail your audits for changing software without the vendor's approval. For their part, the vendor supports you buying the new version of their device for a few million quid and it now runs via USB attached to a Windows 10 computer running their proprietary software.
      - dwattttt 11mo ago

grishka 11mo ago

The way some language runtimes have dropped support for Windows 7 feels outright malicious.

krior 11mo ago
Malicious? Thats a heavy accusation.
Ygg2 11mo ago
Malicious? It's almost 20 years old (it will be in 2029).
- eimrine 11mo ago
  So why the 20 years has no outcomed anything better than 7? The result is malicious.
  - Yossarrian22 11mo ago
    Define better? I’d prefer modern Debian or Ubuntu over Windows 7 any day
    - eimrine 11mo ago
      Modern Ubuntu is a laughable example with a lot of untested Rust components added just for the sake of some big corporations. Defining better OS is almost as complicated as defining better philosophy. Somebody is leftist, somebody is rightist you know what I mean. When you see what's better usually you can not unseen it. For me Woedows 7 can give: 1. years of uptime (still with regular browsing! and with using S-states!); 2. native support of god-like NTFS, all my personal backups has it; 3. better support on laptops, for example just try to ditch the UnneededD (Devuan) and you are going to say buy-buy to predictabrle S-states, stable USB performance when using multiple devices and who knows what else; 4. the best battery time among all the market; 5. some old hardware like ATI videocard can not be run on modern kernell, also some old hardware like my digital oscilloscope, my friend's digital syntheiser - all of that makes me not just use but love he Bill Gate's crap. You don't even tied to any version of your appreciated Debian. 6. A lot of industry-best software at least requires me to have Wine. Foobar as the best audio player, STDU as the best book reader, Viktoria as the best HDD tester etc. I have a terabyte of music, hundreds gigs of books and dozens of external disk drives, consuming all of that is my typical non-work activity. 7. I also still use it for my daily job which involves using Internets. No viruces gotten, no unexpected behaviour observed, just working.

archargelod 11mo ago

Languages that compile to C (e.g. Nim) are great on older systems. If a system has a working C compiler (or cross-compiler), there’s a good chance that it’ll just work. I’ve myself compiled Nim on Windows 7, Windows XP, and Haiku, and have run simple Nim programs on the C64 and GameBoy Advance.

self_awareness 11mo ago
Tried to use Nim with VBCC to cross-compile to Amiga, but I failed. I think Nim does some pretty heavy assumptions about the C compiler that is used to compile the generated code.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Just in case you aren't in the loop, but there are gcc and llvm based Amiga cross compilers.
  - amiga386 11mo ago
    GCC cross-compiling for the Amiga is available from https://franke.ms/git/bebbo/amiga-gcc https://franke.ms/git/bebbo/amiga-gcc for a standalone toolchain, and https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug for one that requires VSCode. I'm not aware of any working LLVM solution? All I know is that LLVM supports MC680x0 as a backend, can spit out 68k-but-non-amiga-objects and some brave souls have trying to use vlink or mold to produce Amiga executables. Have you seen any working LLVM-based Amiga (680x0 in hunk format) cross-compilers in the wild?
    - actionfromafar 11mo ago
      I probably just confused m68k support with HUNK support. Maybe one could use https://github.com/BinaryMelodies/RetroLinker https://github.com/BinaryMelodies/RetroLinker
      - 11mo ago

david_wpg 11mo ago

Use Temurin Java 8 JDK/JRE. It's designed to be 1:1 compatible with Oracle Java.

Fulgen 11mo ago

The problem is, as usual, that some people want that support, but nobody is actually interested in helping out with that support - and that doesn't only include people willing to help out with the code, it includes things like CI. Just how the riscv targets won't be able to reach tier 1 without GH or someone else offering CI support. Rust's target tiers, while historically not as enforced as they are today, have requirements attached to them that each target has to fulfill; demoting a target or removing support isn't done for fun, but because of what the reality reflects. In Windows 7's case, support from the Tier 1 Windows target was not so much removed as it was acknowledged that the support guaranteees just didn't exist - host tools had long been dead with LLVM having removed support for running on Windows 7, and tier 1 support wasn't guaranteed without any CI to test it on. Thus support was removed, and very soon contributors popped up to maintain the win7 target which is tier 3 and accurately reflects the support gurantees of that target. (Not a jab at your situation btw, and I wish I could offer you a solution beyond the win7 target - but as it's essentially the preexisting Windows 7 support extracted into a target that matched its reality, it works quite well in practice)

duskdozer 11mo ago
I do wonder how much support is removed because of genuine maintenance or compatibility burden, because I've encountered enough examples where it was done solely because some target was deemed "too old" arbitrarily, even if it would still work without any modifications.
- s1mplicissimus 11mo ago
  > even if it would still work without any modifications even in this case, maintenance burden is still real. supporting the old target often prevents you from using features/tools that make maintenance easier
- TylerE 11mo ago
  Perhaps the best example I can think of is the whole situation InstallShield is....massive crapware and actually generated 16 bit installers way way after anyone was using 16bit PCs. Nobody notices until, I think it was W8 or W10 dropped support for running 16bit executables (something about dropping the subsystem that supported them.

BiteCode_dev 11mo ago

The question is how much are people willing to pay for this trouble. Usually industries that stick to very old system did so because they didn't want to invest resources in the migration.

thewebguyd 11mo ago
> Usually industries that stick to very old system did so because they didn't want to invest resources in the migration. That can be the case, but there's also a lot of instance where it's not a matter of not wanting to invest, but that being stuck on an older system is the only option until a larger component also goes EOL or dies and cannot be repaired. I see this all the time in manufacturing. User control interfaces that run on Windows XP or 2k. Machine is still great, can still get parts & repair it, but the software has long ago since stopped being supported. The manufacturer isn't going to spend 6 figures to replace a machine that hasn't fully depreciated yet. In these instances, you just air gap it off and you're fine.

jonkoops 11mo ago

What kind of business are you in that you need to be able to support these platforms that have been end-of-life for quite some time? Genuine question.

eimrine 11mo ago
In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets. For example we still have corona-style limitations like no paying with card if the country is bombed somewhere or the businessman risks to be fined. The thing is that nobody wants to buy something more expensive than Pentium 4 or Core2duo especially because most of accounting software still does not support multithreading. So we the businessmen use to mass-buy that cheap hardware, then we install W7 as a good enough OS with no irrigating/pesky/unneeded nanny notifications. The used motherboard if dies it makes no problem, it costs $10. Believe me, the 7 is a perfect OS for self-spying to our Governments and if you want to lobby Rust into this business you have to support W7 somehow.
- iSnow 11mo ago
  In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets. If that country happens to be Germany, it's to combat tax fraud.
  - indigo945 11mo ago
    Germany still does not generally require this. It's required if you use an electronic cash register (and only since recently), but if you don't, it's perfectly legal to just tally the money with pen and paper at the end of the business day. It's how all the small fast food restaurants do tax evasion: just scribble half of what you actually sold on the back of a napkin, and that's enough "proof" for the tax authorities. The current governing coalition has come to an agreement that electronic cash registers will be mandatory starting in 2027, but that law hasn't been passed yet.

GardenLetter27 11mo ago

Why? That effort is far better spent on developing new things and taking advantage of modern hardware. People need to upgrade. I'm surprised any machine running Vista could even use the modern web.

cwillu 11mo ago
People do not, in fact, need to upgrade.
voidUpdate 11mo ago
The only things really driving upgrades are gaming and web browsing. If you dont need to do either of those, you could probably get by with windows 9x
officeplant 11mo ago
Upgrade all you want, some modern machines just can't run the software needed to talk to and control old industrial, fire, medical, etc equipment. Somewhere out there is a Windows 98 machine controlling an industrial machine that will out live early posters on HN.

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

I thought the entire point of Kotlin was to allow you to write in a more modern language, and then compile to older versions of Java no? I've not kept up with Kotlin much, but I would expect it to help a little. I know uh FreePascal targets everything including the Gameboy. But then Pascal isn't super modern or sexy unfortunately.