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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

> If that's not stable, I don't know what is.

What is? An immense amount of resources (developers) poured into developing live patches to make applications work on each newer version of Windows (or helping the application developers fix their applications). It's an interesting conceptual grey area - I don't consider it backward compatibility in a strict sense.

This is documented in the book "The old new thing" by Raymond Chen (it's possible also to read the blog, but the book gives an organic view).

It's fascinating how far-sighted Microsoft was; this approach, clearly very expensive, has been fundamental in making Windows the dominant O/S (for desktop computers).

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It's because Microsoft understands and respects that computers and operating systems exist to let the user achieve things.

The user ultimately doesn't care if his computer is an x86 or an ARM or a RISC-V, or if it's running Windows or Mac or Linux or Android. What the user cares about is running Winamp to whip some llama's ass, or more likely opening Excel to get work done or fire up his favorite games to have fun.

Microsoft respects that, and so strives to make sure Windows is the stepping stone users can (and thusly will) use to get whatever it is they want to do done.

This is fundamentally different to MacOS, where Apple clearly dictates what users can and cannot do. This is fundamentally different to FOSS, where the goal is using FOSS and not what FOSS can be used for.

It's all simple and obvious in hindsight, but sometimes it's the easiest things that are also the hardest.

It's amazing how people don't want Linux to "Be like Windows"... but as far as I'm concerned windows is close to ideal, just with a few flaws and places where FOSS can do better...

This has very severe drawbacks, so it's not unambiguously desirable.

Windows APIs are probably a mess because of this (also ignoring the fact that only company with extremely deep pockets can afford this approach). There is at least one extreme case where Windows had to keep a bug, because a certain program relied on it, and couldn't be made to work otherwise.

And yet Windows 11 keeps taking away user control, becoming more like Apple every update.

> I don't consider it backward compatibility in a strict sense.

Just in the sense that 100% of the people who use the phrase "backward compatibility" mean.

Sure, from a user perspective, but not from an operative perspective: in the cases of live binary patching, Microsoft required to call the application developer to be legally clear; in orther cases, APIs behave differently based on the executable being run. There's a lot more than just keeping the API stable.

I get that my initial comment was a bit of a throwaway, but I can unpack it a bit. I think it’s a mistake to regard a working backward compatibility functionality as deficient because it requires maintenance and the cooperation of the parties involved. That’s just… engineering, right?

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