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Except it's really the OS doing cartwheels to keep them going.

At one point I stopped caring how they do it. I just want them to do it. We can't all be everywhere at the stack at the same time. We have work to do.

Or maybe it's the OS refraining from doing cartwheels that keeps them going.

You're right in that a stable ABI goes a long way to keep old binaries working!

My point is about this sort of thing:

> [...] anybody who has read the Old New Thing blog (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) or Raymond Chen's chapter on Windows backwards compatibility (http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplech..., PDF) will be both impressed and horrified at the lengths the Windows team went to in order to avoid breaking programs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13450629

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