As someone who went through the the 68k -> PPC -> x86 transitions with shockingly minimal fuss (also even the MacOS -> OS X + Classic transitions) I wish I could upvote this comment a thousand times.

Sure. But they're also the people who recently decided a whole new programming language was necessary. And they're on, what, their 10th major iOS release?

Which seems to fit with my point, which is that no matter how smart you are, you won't be able to "sit down" and design something perfect.

And unlike Apple, most of us can't spin up large teams to try to hide the cost of change from our users. It would be nice if open source projects had $200 billion in cash sitting around, but that's not the world we live in.

That's again not to say that GTK is doing anything right; I wouldn't know. My only point is that holding open source projects to impossible standards won't help anything.

I had a name conflict in an ios project... found out the header it conflicted with was from apple lisa era, meant to allow gui draw calls to work with quickdraw