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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

He seems to make a contradictory point... he complains:

> iOS 11 dropped support for 32-bit apps. That means if the developer isn’t around at the time of the iOS 11 release or isn’t willing to go back and update a once-perfectly-fine app, chances are you won’t be seeing their app ever again.

but then he also says:

> To have a healthy ecosystem you need to go back and revisit. You need to occasionally throw stuff away and replace it with better stuff.

So which is it? If you want to replace stuff with something better, that means the old stuff won't work anymore... or, it will work by placing a translation/emulation layer around it, which he describes as:

> We put virtual machines inside Linux, and then we put Docker inside virtual machines, simply because nobody was able to clean up the mess that most programs, languages and their environment produce. We cover shit with blankets just not to deal with it.

Seems like he wants it both ways.

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And yet at the time of its release, iOS 11 was the most buggy version in recent memory. (This record has since been beaten by iOS 13.)

I don't quite know what's going on inside Apple, but it doesn't feel like they're choosing which features to remove in a particularly thoughtful way.

---

Twenty years ago, Apple's flagship platform was called Mac OS (Mac OS ≠ macOS), and it sucked beyond repair. So Apple shifted to a completely different platform, which they dubbed Mac OS X. A slow and clunky virtualization layer was added for running "classic" Mac OS software, but it was built to be temporary, not a normal means of operation.

For anyone invested in the Mac OS platform at the time, this must have really sucked. But what's important is that Apple made the transition once! They realized that a clean break was essential, and they did it, and we've been on OS X ever since. There's a 16-year-old OS X app called Audio Slicer which I still use regularly in High Sierra. It would break if I updated to Catalina, but, therein lies my problem with today's Apple.

If you really need to make a clean break, fine, go ahead! It will be painful, but we'd best get it over with.

But that shouldn't happen more than once every couple decades, and even less as we get collectively more experienced at writing software.

I think that's not quite the point in the article. The idea is, in my reading, that we've built lazily on castles of sand for so long that sometimes we think it makes sense to throw away things we shouldn't, and other times we obsessively wrap/rewrap/paper over things we should throw away. What falls into each category is obviously debatable, but the author seems to be critiquing the methodology we use to make those decision--debatable or not, people aren't debating it so much as they're taking the shortest and often laziest path without prioritizing the right things (efficiency, consistency).

Even with our priorities in order, there will still be contentious, hard choices (to deprecate so-and-so or not; to sacrifice a capability for consistency of interface or not), but the author's point is that our priorities are not in order in the first place, so the decisions we make end up being arbitrary at best, and harmful/driven by bad motivations at worst.

It's possible to both improve efficiency and maintain backwards compatibility.

Combining these two is only a non-issue with unlimited resources.

Otherwise it's a tradeoff if you add constraints like cost, effort, time to market, and so on...

Windows does it. And despite that, versions like win 7 were pretty fast

I'd argue that of any software project on the planet, Windows is the closest to having unlimited resources; especially when you consider the number of Windows customers for whom backwards compatibility is the #1 feature on the box.

And speed isn't the only metric that matters; having both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of DLLs uses a non-trivial (to some people) amount of disk space, bandwidth, complexity, etc.

Surely, Apple and Google have just about as many resources as Microsoft does.

If Android, Mac OS, etc were super slimmed down systems in comparison to Windows, I would understand the argument much better. Instead, it feels like we're in the worst of both worlds.

I have heard a lot of complaints about the costs to the Windows ecosystem caused by having to always maintain backwards compatibility.

>Windows does it.

Yeah, didn't say it's impossible. I said it's a tradeoff.

Windows does it and pays for it with slower releases, more engineers, bugs, strange interaction between old and new, several layers of UI and API code for devs to decode and for users to be confused with, less ability to move to new paradigms (why would devs bother if the old work), 2 versions of libs loaded (32/64 bit), and several other ways besides...

E.g. I've stopped using Windows for a decade or so, but I read of the 3 (4?) settings panels it has, the modern, the Vista style, the XP style, and so on, with some options in one, the others in the other (if you click some "advanced" menu, etc).

Fuck no. A bit faster does not mean fast. It's slow as fuck basically across the board.

The goal is that you throw out things that aren't useful (cost > benefit, or better replacement available and easily usable), not that you have a periodic "throw out everything written before X".

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