Over 25 years ago I wrote a package in GNU Emacs (ielm) that, as I was chuffed to learn from a HN thread recently, is still in widespread use.
Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#12Oracle stored procedures run by cron jobs. Ran for 5 years with no problems.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#13In undergrad, I wrote a Gulp plugin (a Node build tool) to run shell scripts. The added value was the ability to connect the script's stdin/stdout into the Gulp pipeline.
I wrote it in a weekend, just as a one-off while I was learning Node and procrastinating my other studies.
Today, it gets just under 30k weekly downloads. Which isn't a ton, but it shows that it's still being used.
After I got a real job, I found it in an internal third-party repo. Apparently some contractors built a site with it years ago.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#14Life Insurance core code (ANSI C). So contracts closed now have to work for 60 years or more.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#15If you live in US / Mexic and you use a Tiburon locker renting system (https://www.tiburonlockers.com/lockers-ele.html) to store your items while in a venue/location then you're using code I wrote between 2008-2010. Everything you see in there and more (like iceberg, what you see is only 10%) is written in Delphi with PostgreSQL as DB. Behind the scenes is just a Windows XP running my app in full screen (KIOSK mode).
Also if you drive a Mazda RX-8 (J64/J61J/J61A internal name) from 2007 that has immobilizer feature (back then it was an opt-in feature, nowadays every car has immobilizer by law) then the code running immobilizer feature was partially written by me between 2005-2006.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#16Software written in '98 on Oracle 8i/Sun/Solaris. Mostly SQL, PL/SQL & shell scripts. Still running even after db and os upgrades in 2023. It was mosly a database for online and batch transaction processing that fed a data warehouse and include the Extract-Transform-Load pipeline.
The reason for the longevity is the focus on extreme performance by focusing on I/O by utilizing the database and parallelism offered by the platform. Also, our coding language choices were pragmatic and are still supported. So, even with all the db and platform version upgrades, the code still runs.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#17I was one of the original authors of ds_cinder (a multimedia framework for building interactive designs.) it’s been actively developed since 2012 and has been used to make hundreds of interactive displays and experiences. Some features may seem normal place today, but there weren’t general frameworks with pdf, video playing, amx interface, multitouch support, and a ui engine built for touch screens back in 2011-2012.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#18I've been in the IT racket for over 30 years, so maybe I have an unfair advantage in terms of candidates.
I helped rewrite FIS (RSTS) as XENTIS (VMS) for Park Software in the early 1980s and worked on it for over a decade. It lasted as long as VMS did. This was the prototypical "report writer" / wizard.
I wrote a logistics system for a nonprofit on donated VAX hardware. That lasted a decade before Y2K doomed their accounting system (VAX don't care about no steenkin' Y2K!) and both were replaced together.
I wrote a procmail guide (documentation) and a web page with a javascript-based .procmailrc wizard that rattled around the internet for a while.
I've got various pieces of automation which have been ported to different systems for as long as two decades (I don't think I have anything currently running which is older than that).
I invite you to view the repos I have pinned at GitHub: https://github.com/m3047/ although none is older than 2019.
I seem to be building a command-line based federated SIEM leveraging DNS and Redis. At this point I don't know if it will ever see the light of day in terms of wider availability, haven't found anyone else who's onboard with this level of sedition (yet).
I've built other software which was popular for a short while.
I'll offer an honorable mention for http://twiki.org/ as I used to curate a distribution. I'm still personally running the version based on the Dakar release from 2006. I've patched a couple of security issues and made some small changes due to changes in Perl in that time.
So what makes code last?
It's not a beauty contest. It solves a problem, but you can solve the problem without it. It doesn't sit astride a shear layer. It inspires confidence in terms of predictability. It offers useful internal telemetry or other mechanisms which allow that confidence to be tested, explored, or extended. Oftentimes it doesn't solve THE problem, but is composable to solve various problems. It doesn't chase trends (XENTIS pretty much filled out out every useful feature we could think of in its niche, but it stayed in that niche). It might be personal bias, but configuration is declarative or at least machine parseable and accessible (so you can compare configs over the last decade or more).
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#19I wrote an Assetto Corsa server plugin for the ACRL racing league which enforced track limits. The initial commit was in 2016, and to my knowledge it's still in use.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#20I think that the biggest factor in code longevity is serendipity. You wander into a project that will find the right user interest and some kind of sustainability model that supports its maintenance and continued use. This could be getting into a successful commercial software product, an enterprise solution that might just turn into a legacy, or some vibrant open source community.
My oldest code that I myself still use in production is probably some Python web services first prototyped around 2009 and then refactored several times including the port from Python 2.x to 3.x, which we deferred until 2018-2019. It is still in use because we keep finding use for it in funded projects. The Python language and hosting environments have been stable enough to keep it running with minimal externally-forced maintenance.
I might have had some older shell scripts that were in personal use for longer periods, but I've found myself retiring them one after another rather than trying to maintain them anymore. This included lots of my own "paperless office" kinds of tasks to acquire, convert, display, or otherwise manipulate various document and image files. I also used my own custom backup tools and email replication strategies for a very long time before begrudgingly moving to contemporary tools.
With other open source contributions, it's harder to say how long something lasted. Some of my C code ended up in grid computing libraries that might have also gone for almost 20 years, but I suspect it fell into disuse at least 5 years ago.
I also helped arrange some work on SSLeay, which later forked into OpenSSL, but did not author code changes myself.
Through my job, I was a bleeding edge user of a lot of Linux features and tried to provide good bug reporting, but did not contribute as an author. This included early SMP support, large file support, kernel-level GPU support, and various wireless and wired networking drivers.
My earliest open source engagement was as a beta tester for XFree86 2D drivers around 1994 while in college. I did a bit more of this with early 3D driver testing at my first job. I may have contributed some register dumps and other hardware info, but still would not say I authored any of it. Also as drivers are hardware specific, I don't know how long it took for my efforts to fully dissipate.