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Comment by trinovantes | Hacker News Reader

> The code does not build with today's engineering tools, and is released as-is.

Unfortunate given Microsoft's track record of maintaining backwards compatibility

Microsoft has an amazing track record of binary compatibility, not source. Although that does imply that you should be able to run an old compiler and make it work.

I feel like it's close... but it's pretty hard to take engineers off of modern day projects to go figure out what's needed to make an almost 30-year old set of source code to build. I imagine some folks will get this building soon that are smarter than we are!

As nice as it is to see some of the old source code released for nostalgia reasons (the old winfile also comes to mind) it's been even nicer to see some of the modern Microsoft apps make their way out as well. I've been able to directly interact with e.g. Windows Terminal development in ways traditional closed development would have just left me frustrated and disappointed.

Happy to learn more, ping me in some form. The Windows Terminal is building a community on GitHub and it's pretty active.

It's not surprising considering how many major versions of Windows have since passed. XP and 7 each broke large swaths of software, for mostly good reasons, despite all sorts of work to maintain compatibility.

The important thing is it's a starting point. foone specifically indicated a desire to update and extend the software, which means at minimum, a fork that runs on modern platforms.

Isn't this a really good reason for making it public? Microsoft obviously has no reason (i.e. ROI) to spend days trying to make this build.

bruh you can't build Apple software that was written like 2 years ago what are you talking about

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