Hacker News Reader

Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

All the people on that Twitter thread getting butthurt about it and complaining that Windows' backwards compatibility is a bad thing... WTF koolaid have they been drinking?

I don't often sing Microsoft's praises but backwards compatibility is something they get absolutely right: something they've always got right. Everything doesn't have to be changing and breaking all the time and, to me, it's a mark of maturity when an organisation can maintain compatibility so as not to inconvenience - and introduce unbudgeted (and sometimes very high) costs to - users, integrators, and consumers. Top marks, Microsoft.

View on HN

I agree.

As an example: The Xbox Series X, their newest flagship model, is fully backwards compatible with all of the Xbox physical CD games from all Xbox systems. Just pop the CD in and you are good to go.

It's actually not backwards compatible with all previous Xbox games. There's a compatibility list...

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.

Apparently it does not run Outrun 2!

(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.)

The Linux world would benefit strongly from having a much bigger commitment to backwards compatibility in foundational libraries. Obviously there is nobody who can force e.g. OpenSSL to keep supporting old versions or to provide them as wrappers over the latest version, or to force GTK to keep around working versions of libraries exposing all interfaces dating from GTK 1.0 onwards. But if we could have a project to do just that, that would be great. We all want people to move with the times and adopt new versions of their dependencies so security exploits can be patched, but right now if you're writing software for Linux, either you package all your dependencies with it (forever calcifying all security exploits), or you keep on top of all updates of everything you use, or your software simply won't run within a couple of years. The open source community lives and dies by the ability of users to run existing software. Effectively continually deleting open source software from existence, while windows keeps supporting every single program written since 30 years ago, means we're always falling behind in usefulness. There ought to exist an organisation dedicated to maintaining old versions of widely used system libraries either in their original form, or as wrappers over the new versions (to the extent possible), so that people can rely on their existing software. Since we're talking about open source, that would mean maintaining the development kits as well, so old source can be built on new systems. It makes no sense to just let all this work rot, it is our greatest treasure.

So many people dismiss Tcl as near garbage, but Tcl/Tk applications written more than 20 years ago still run as intended including GUI, and they run on Linux, Windows and Mac. You just install a new --or old, whatever-- version of Tcl/Tk and the scripts will run, agnostically. I have a few I made myself 15 to 20 years ago and at least with those I never have to worry about distro upgrades, repositories or libc version.

Is that because Tcl/Tk never added modern features?

That's pretty much exactly what Red Hat does with their Enterprise Linux.

> The Linux world would benefit strongly from having a much bigger commitment to backwards compatibility in foundational libraries

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com