Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#41

Post by ghssds » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

snovymgodym wrote: post #2

ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users. It's too bad, beca…

They had no chance. Look how long it tooks for Wine to get where they are. Their project is Wine + a kernel + device drivers compatibility, and a moving target.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#42

Post by ahartmetz » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #30

kristianc wrote: post #29

Nokia Maps. There was a brief period in the early 2010s where Nokia had the best mapping product on the planet, and it was given away for free on Lumia phones at a time when TomTom and Garmin were still charging $60+ for navigation apps.

Still around as "Here Maps"

Started to suck pretty badly not long after getting acquired by German car companies. It used to be good.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#43

Post by daxfohl » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

holysantamaria wrote: post #27

Opa language 2012, it was a typed nextjs before its time. http://opalang.org/ I think the market was still skeptical about nodejs on the server at the time but other than that I don’t really know why it didn’t take off

I came to say Opa too. I liked the language but the meteor-like framework it was bundled with, while nice for prototyping, was a pain to work around when it didn't do what you needed.

That said, frameworks were all the buzz back in the day, so the language alone probably wouldn't have gone anywhere without it.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#44

Post by mwpmaybe » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 12:02 AM UTC

I thought Google Wave was going to kill email and chat and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#45

Post by daxfohl » Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

Heroku? I know it's still around, though IDK who uses it, but I miss those days when it was thriving. One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.

I often wonder, if AI had come 15 years earlier, would it have been a ton better because there weren't a billion different ways to do things? Would we have ever bothered to come up with all the different tech, if AI was just chugging through features efficiently, with consistent training data etc.?