Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

They will probably retire Rosetta2 in a few years, like they did with Rosetta.

Apple usually seems to care about getting the bulk of applications to transition over, and the rest is just collateral damage/the devs should’ve just updated their software.

I’m confused. Linus has repeatedly stated that the ABI should be stable, “we don't break user space”. There are exceptions, but any proposal that makes a breaking change to the kernel’s external symbols is very hard to push through.

I don’t remember anything breaking because of a new kernel version except device drivers, which are part of the kernel anyway and should be compiled for a specific kernel version. They are not applications, so they shouldn’t rely on assumptions about the ABI.

Most Linux distros offer mechanisms to compile a version-dependent interface to isolate a version-independent driver or program that messes too closely with the kernel.

> Some extinct “grown-up” OS like VMS?

I’d say the age of binary compatibility ended with most of those “grown-up” OSs becoming legacy. I usually test (compile and test) my C code on multiple platforms, ranging from Windows to Solaris on SPARC (emulated these days, sadly). I haven’t yet figured out a cost-effective way to test it under IBM z/OS’s USS (which makes z/OS a certified UNIX).

Source(s) ?

it's because the nvidia drivers are opaque blobs, rather than a source distribution.

If nvidia distributed their drivers as open source, i would imagine developers would likely "fix" their games properly because they'd be able to see what is going on underneath the hood, and write more optimal code.

of course, this removes some "competitive advantage" nvidia has over their AMD counterpart.

That's an innocent example but do recall that circa 1995-2005 or so, Microsoft looked like a dangerous monopolist and could have been in legal jeopardy if a product that competes with office (say WordPerfect) quit working when they went from Win 95 to Win 98 or Win 2k to Win XP.

I'd also add that more than once I've had web pages and applications I've made been used as test cases by Microsoft and been contacted by people from Microsoft about compatibility issues. (... and I've never been an advocate of Microsoft browsers, often I've been quite the opposite.) I haven't heard once from Netscape, Mozilla, Apple, Opera or Google about something like this.

In todays world it looks like a ludicrous solution to the problem. The game vendor needs to HTFU and distribute a patch via steam or whatever and that’s a totally reasonable stance for microsoft or apple to take, because the infrastructure for patch distribution is pervasive and robust now.

That’s why that someone is getting paid -it’s their job.

If you want software to power important things in society, like transport and energy, you need to have a certain level of responsibility for reliability.

As this post demonstrates, Right now we have immature children who are used to breaking things for the sake of a new fad, in charge of critical systems.

You’re thinking like an engineer. Microsoft is a business. Backwards compatible is its major core competency.

Microsoft's point of view is that the underlying software doesn't matter. The user's software _has_ to run. The Application Compatibility Database (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/devnotes/app...) is, overall, a relatively small component, and all it does is apply some shims if your executable is in that list. Performance issues in Windows do not stem from anywhere near the kernel. The kernel team is absolutely top tier. The kernel itself is of much higher quality than what you'd find on Linux, or MacOS.

Now, the upper layers however...

It had to be a step forward, not a step back. I mean I don't know what you're using at the moment, but if your favorite application didn't work on the next version, would you upgrade?

This is why Apple spent so much on Rosetta, first when going from PowerPC or whatever to x86/64, then from that to ARM / M1, while in the meantime building a developer and application ecosystem that allows for easier transition between CPU architectures and environments.

It's precisely because of that backwards compatibility, insane in both the workings and the result, that keeps most people using Windows.

People use computers to get stuff done, and Windows lets people use the absolutely massive library of Windows programs whether it was written today or over 30 years ago.

Yep, the most popular desktop OS in the world and the 2nd biggest company in the world.

There are business reasons to maintain backwards compatibility, and they were very strong before the easily updated software.

You have been playing your game fine. You installed a new Windows OS and now the game no longer runs. As an average customer, who do you blame? Hint: not the game studio.

Regarding that hobbyist OS OpenBSD, where the developers care about nothing besides security, there were no proprietary application packages available. Most retailed applications in those days ran on SunOS/Solaris or HP/UX.

There's been quite a few cases for me, like Star Citizen for example, where games perform significantly better under Proton with DXVK than it does on Windows!

What is kind of neat is every windows application/dll is a valid DOS application. The first part of all of them is a valid MZ DOS 16 EXEcutable. Windows just treats it as a skippable header and reads the real header that is about 100 bytes in and then decides which subsystem to fire up (win3x, win32, OS/2, etc). But if you take a exe compiled today with current tools and put it on a DOS 3.3 box it would run the exe and print out it can not run (the exe has that in there).

Also from that era not all DOS applications were exclusively 16 bit. Many were hybrid. Just to have better control over the memory space instead of using segmentation was usually worth the speed boost (as well as the bigger registers). Windows from that era usually had extra 'pid' file where you could basically tag the executable as 'hey you are about to run a 32 bit app get out of the way windows oh and support dpmi while you are at it'.

I'm aware of win32s, I used to run it but still it seems unlikely this is a win32 console app unless there's an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances behind this.

Or perhaps it was simply recompiled after all despite what the Twitter post states?

however it sort of undermines the "insane compatibility" / "stable API" point if mass-market Windows software produced before the 2001 release of XP mostly doesn't work on modern Windows

NT effectively forked Win32 (introduced with Windows 3.1) into something incompatible

(meanwhile it all runs on Wine perfectly fine)

I was playing an old MMORPG called The Realm. It's been live since 1995 and ran until just a couple months ago. It only knew how to run in 640x480.

I tried to write a program that would create a scaled up version, but it didn't work well, especially since the game would create child windows for certain UI elements. I was writing it in C, which isn't my strongest language, simply so I could call Win32 APIs more easily.

These changes are not like they announce something and the next day the libraries/APIs are gone. There is always a transition period that is long enough for the apps to be updated.

So that's a pretty hard limit. Linux can run binaries that were compiled to the latest binary standard in 98.

Actually yes, C&C Red Alert 2 was running slow, but the community came up with patches that make it play nice, including the multiplayer which now works better than it did back in 2000.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/backward-compatibility

However, that is an impressive amount of backwards compatibility that other game consoles don't have.

(I only have the JP version, which I assume will never work with my UK Xbox Series X, even if the UK version would actually be compatible. Maybe I need to dig it out of my garage and try it anyway.)

No point when this problem has been solved with containers (docker, flatpak etc).

Using Windows 11 the answer is ReFS.

The bar is so vastly different for windows and Linux users and by and large I try to keep my mouth shut because I dual boot and I know DAMN WELL which OS needs more handholding and has required fuck-it-start-over handling. God forbid you ever try to login to Win11 with low disk space, you're totally FUBAR and there are countless reports online of this EXACT FKING SCENARIO. Imagine for one second if Linux became COMPLETELY BROKEN if you ran out of disk space, it would be A JOKE.

If manufacturer would consistently publish to LVFS, I would NEVER TOUCH WINDOWS AGAIN. And I play Halo every single day of my life. Sorry gaming on Linux is less of a complete pain in the ass than using windows. You paying attn MSFT? Your stock price is 80% of my life, so I sure hope so.

"Everything is constantly changing"?! Are you FUCKING kidding me? What has changed in Linux is the past 15 years other than Wayland, which, I've been running for 4+ years and know what is BS and what isn't (DM me and I'll screen share stream my desktop at arbitrary scale factors at 240hz). I can run Gnome2, I can run kde3 for gods sake. Meanwhile there's crapware discussed here weekly just trying to get a basic Start Menu back in Win11, or constant complaints about ads, or regressions or ON and ON; do y'all have ANY self respect?

Stockholm syndrome, laziness, take your pick, it's exhausting.

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-windows-11-without-mi...

They may not care about backwards compatibility as an abstract concept, but they would like their computer continue functioning the same way today as it did yesterday.

Although MS is getting somewhat bad at that from a general OS perspective with their updates.

Across the rest of the world macOS numbers aren't that high, still better than "Desktop Linux" though.

So yeah, I'll take my chances with that luck.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-and-w...