3 ms·
how complicated would a port to linux be ?
by BaudouinVH 2mo ago
how complicated would a port to linux be ?
- firesteelrain 2mo agoJust use WINE?
- shakna 2mo agoAfraid 16bit Word versions have a "Garbage" rating on Wine.
- firesteelrain 2mo agoI guess I misunderstood. It was ported to 64bit I thought
- wolfi1 2mo agowas my impression as well
- pythonRon 2mo agoA native Linux application would be preferable, even if it does work with WINE (which I don't know... yet).
- snarfy 2mo agoWin32 is Linux's only stable ABI.
- somat 2mo agoA fair statement, but a stable ABI is only needed when you don't have the source. Seeing as most of the value proposition of Linux is that having the source is good, I find no fault in an unstable ABI.
- avadodin 2mo agoSource available is of little use for many of the current breed of languages and libraries. Even standard C support is starting to break down as incompatible "standard" newC is being pushed because some C++ guy didn't like K&R function definitions. Linux's remarkably stable kernel ABI is the only reason we can still use a lot of unbuildable dependency hell stuff on Docker containers.
- M95D 2mo ago> a stable ABI is only needed when you don't have the source > A stable ABI is only needed when you don't have the source or you don't know enough C to fix incompatibilities with every new version. There, I fixed it for you.
- somat 2mo agoThat is mixing up a stable ABI vs a stable API. OpenBSD is sort of the poster child here, They notoriously do not have a stable ABI, I would not want to try and ship closed source software on obsd, it would be an absolute nightmare. But their API is very stable (insert counterexample of the recent pledge change here) An interesting side effect of obsd changing their ABI fairly often is they are good at it(add comment about this is because it is a small self contained system with few users here), in Linux land an ABI change is a nasty, messy, multi year process with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, for obsd, it just happens. To misquote Raul Julia in Streetfighter "For you, the day the ABI changed was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.
- M95D 2mo agoIt's the compiler too. I recently found out that kernel 6.6 can't be compiled by gcc 15. So, even if you have the source, unless it's extremely simple, at some point the current toolchain will refuse to build it.
- anthk 2mo agoWinemaker + winegcc.
- pythonRon 2mo agoThis was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read about this port. It's heartening to find out I'm not the only one!
- happycube 2mo agoI prompted Claude Opus 5 (I don't really have the Fable tokens to spare) to do just that (via winelib). It's gotten to the point where it opens, runs for three seconds, and abruptly exits. edit: got it running but a ton of things are do-nothing, and the fonts are completely rubbish. Not really worth posting ATM, but I'll see if it can fix things further by running the UI tests and telling it some of the things that don't work... (That it was able to build and run at all with just a few prompts is a HFS moment, though!)
- happycube 2mo agoAn interesting thing that came up is that MSVC uses 32-bit longs instead of 64, so a pure gcc/winelib build is another level of 64-bit porting. Claude then suggested using mingw instead, which makes sense...