11–20 of 27 posts
I find it pretty laughable to claim that software written in this (brand new?) language, progsbase, will last a "ballpark" of "centuries". The transistor isn't even a century old. To my knowledge, nothing created by humans has lasted centuries with the equivalent of one day/year of maintenance work.
Is that just a commercial for this progsbase thing? I certainly like the assertion that that code won't rot for "centuries". Maybe a fizzbuzz implementation will survive this but even there I have my doubts.
"For example, when 64-bit Intel CPUs were launched, they no longer supported a list instructions. If these were used in a library, then the library no longer works." Is this true. The only thing I can find is that the old x87 fpu instructions might not work on x64 arch.
This is both true and highly misleading. In X64 mode many instructions were gone. However you couldn't execute a 32-bit program directly in that mode anyway so it was the least of your problems. Everything was still there in 32-bit mode. Nobody would have bought the processors if they didn't work with existing software.
Is that just a commercial for this progsbase thing? I certainly like the assertion that that code won't rot for "centuries". Maybe a fizzbuzz implementation will survive this but even there I have my doubts.
Interesting, if a bit long perhaps. Also, I've never heard I/O instructions being referred to as "infrastructure instructions" before, can this be a mistranslation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is both true and highly misleading. In X64 mode many instructions were gone. However you couldn't execute a 32-bit program directly in that mode anyway so it was the least of your problems. Everything was still there in 32-bit mode. Nobody would have bought the processors if they didn't work with existing software.
The removed instructions were binary-coded-decimal instructions, push / pop of CS/DS/ES/SS. These are minor instructions, but if your program used them, that alone means it no longer works, and that was the point.
The removal of the segment registers was the only one that really reduced capabilities - VMWare's original solution became impossible because of that. However they were replaced by hypervisor instruction sets which are much more capable. The proposed solution in this article would never have fixed this though - which again is why its true but misleading.
I find it pretty laughable to claim that software written in this (brand new?) language, progsbase, will last a "ballpark" of "centuries". The transistor isn't even a century old. To my knowledge, nothing created by humans has lasted centuries with the equivalent of one day/year of maintenance work.
Further, progsbase is not a brand new language, it is (mostly) a subset of most existing languages. The selection of the subset is new, but not the contents. This is why the progsbase repository contains examples that can be translated into Java, C, C++, JavaScript, C#, PHP, Python and Visual Basic.
I find it pretty laughable to claim that software written in this (brand new?) language, progsbase, will last a "ballpark" of "centuries". The transistor isn't even a century old. To my knowledge, nothing created by humans has lasted centuries with the equivalent of one day/year of maintenance work.
Not only that, but their chart makes it look like adopting older languages now will give you more bit rot resistance. C2: C89 or Python 2 a few decades a developer week C3: C or Python a decade a developer month When it should read: C2: C99 or Python 3 a few decades a developer week C3: C89 or Python 2 a decade a developer month If you start a project today with python 2, the bit rot will be far worse[1] than python…
I find it pretty laughable to claim that software written in this (brand new?) language, progsbase, will last a "ballpark" of "centuries". The transistor isn't even a century old. To my knowledge, nothing created by humans has lasted centuries with the equivalent of one day/year of maintenance work.
It looks like progsbase is essentially a non-free version of Haxe (progsbase requires $65 per month per developer). There is no source available and the code library is full of trivial examples.
Is that just a commercial for this progsbase thing? I certainly like the assertion that that code won't rot for "centuries". Maybe a fizzbuzz implementation will survive this but even there I have my doubts.