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You can write it in C. Bloody thing is like a particularly disgusting cockroach. I bet people can still read it in way too many years, to the extent that C can

by tormeh 12y ago

You can write it in C. Bloody thing is like a particularly disgusting cockroach. I bet people can still read it in way too many years, to the extent that C can be read.

steveklabnik 12y ago
Even in C, it's not insta-portable. In the quote author's case, the UI framework was entirely deprecated, basically requiring a large re-write to use the new API, to keep the same functionality. If you wrote some C code that ran on Mac OS 9, for example, you'd eventually be forced to upgrade, because eventually, there are no computers running OS 9 anymore.
- derefr 12y ago
  Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript"[1] is a rebuttal to this, I think. Effectively, imagine that a compiler, put in static-compilation mode, would link everything required to run a piece of code (the relevant windowing toolkit, all the system libraries, copies of any OS binaries the code spawns, copies of any OS binaries the code sends messages to over an IPC bus, etc.) into something resembling a Docker container, or a Unikernel VM image. Imagine, additionally, that all this then gets translated into some standard bytecode for a high-level abstract platform target that has things like graphics and networking primitives—say, asm.js. Now everything can live as long as something still executes that bytecode. [1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    This will be really cool in the future, someday. But it's a sci-fi like talk for a reason. (and funny enough, when I saw him give this talk, the above quoted situation is exactly what I thought of...)
    - derefr 12y ago
      Maybe it's unrealizable at the moment for x86 code. On the other hand, for random digraphs of arcade-game microcontrollers, JSMESS is doing pretty well at achieving this. :)

by tormeh 12y ago

You can write it in C. Bloody thing is like a particularly disgusting cockroach. I bet people can still read it in way too many years, to the extent that C can be read.

steveklabnik 12y ago

Even in C, it's not insta-portable. In the quote author's case, the UI framework was entirely deprecated, basically requiring a large re-write to use the new API, to keep the same functionality. If you wrote some C code that ran on Mac OS 9, for example, you'd eventually be forced to upgrade, because eventually, there are no computers running OS 9 anymore.

derefr 12y ago
Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript"[1] is a rebuttal to this, I think. Effectively, imagine that a compiler, put in static-compilation mode, would link everything required to run a piece of code (the relevant windowing toolkit, all the system libraries, copies of any OS binaries the code spawns, copies of any OS binaries the code sends messages to over an IPC bus, etc.) into something resembling a Docker container, or a Unikernel VM image. Imagine, additionally, that all this then gets translated into some standard bytecode for a high-level abstract platform target that has things like graphics and networking primitives—say, asm.js. Now everything can live as long as something still executes that bytecode. [1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  This will be really cool in the future, someday. But it's a sci-fi like talk for a reason. (and funny enough, when I saw him give this talk, the above quoted situation is exactly what I thought of...)
  - derefr 12y ago
    Maybe it's unrealizable at the moment for x86 code. On the other hand, for random digraphs of arcade-game microcontrollers, JSMESS is doing pretty well at achieving this. :)