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Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, though pure X11 code should still be easier (ignoring anything not related to the APIs at hand of course, like the assumptions the existing code had about 32bit-ness) since the API hasn't changed at all. Win16 vs Win32 is 99% the same, but there are still a few minor differences, like some changes in how WPARAM (which was now 32bit) was interpreted in a few messages.

Mac OS would be a complete rewrite though, no salvaging that.

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Early 1990s X11 clients are sometimes broken on recent X.Org setups in my experience, in subtle ways usually involving keyboard.

And that's assuming running under X.Org.

As for Win32, if the application didn't do stupid things like setting bitflags that were "reserved for future use", things apparently work without recompile for basic GUI from 1.01 to Windows 10.

Only on Windows 10 32bit, which according to steam stats, is used by 0.10% of users.

The post above was about compiling not running older programs. In terms of running Windows is better, though in either case you do need to find workarounds (what you describe sounds like such a case).

No workarounds - the 16bit DLLs were compatible all the way up from 1.01 to Windows 10 32bit, and from WinNT 3.0 all the way up to Windows 10 64bit.

The problem is that a lot of software... disregarded the specs. Including infamously using "reserved for future use" areas of bitfields, which for example caused a lot of app crashes during early days of Windows 95 (where certain common API gained a new flag that was not compatible with previous flags, which worked fine so long as you didn't set them concurrently - which all properly written applications avoided.)

The specs might be compatible but the programs aren't, exactly because of the assumptions (or plain old buggy code) you mention. So you need workarounds.

I run a lot of older software, especially (though not only) games and i often have to do such workarounds like wrapper or replacement libs. I've also tried running older stuff on Linux (e.g. i have a collection of Linux game demos from the late 90s to early 2000s) and while most stuff run, you do need to find and install a bunch of missing libraries and wrappers (e.g. for OSS support).

> Mac OS would be a complete rewrite though, no salvaging that.

I bet you could get a NeXT application from the early 90s running without too much pain.

The early (earliest?) NeXT APIs start with NX.

macOS doesn't have support for any of these.

I found this out when I tried porting Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb to macOS as a weekend hack.

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