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Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

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Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#361

Post by moonchrome »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #201
moonchrome wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't used Windows in quite a while have you ? Past Windows 7 it's been sliding downhill into bullshit UX, crapware, backend migration to Linux almost exclusively, etc. Random things on top of my head : MacOS doesn't come with candy crush, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify etc. prepopulating your start menu. Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? Yummy Dealing with Windows dev environment is always a PITA eventually - u…

>Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? MacOS also has telemetry. >For backend stuff it's almost implicit that you're running on Linux in prod and macos is well supported because it's fairly similar. Then Windows would be better than MacOS in this regard because WSL2 is exactly Linux, not just "fairly similar" to Linux. >stuff randomly breaking between updates What stuff broke for you between updates? Our entire DS tea…

> MacOS also has telemetry.

And who do I trust more - company that bundles third party crap ware and openly talks about OS ads as monetization avenue. Or a company selling me xxxx$ machine and wanting to sell me a next one with the OS in the future. As much as I dislike Apple walled garden - their incentive structure is way more aligned with me than Microsoft desktop.

> Then Windows would be better than MacOS in this regard because WSL2 is exactly Linux, not just "fairly similar" to Linux.

Haven't seen that be better than a VM.

Doing anything WSL on Windows FS is dog slow and vice versa, split toolsets conflicts (different git config between host and guest, different SSH). Just SSH into a VM - it's a way better experience - the boundaries are clear and the editors know the implications of working on a remote machine.

Not saying you can't use Windows, but you can also eat from a trough - I just prefer not to.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#362

Post by necovek »

moonchrome wrote: post #170
necovek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only used MacOS for a year and only recently (maybe that matters), and I get all the same crappy inconsistent behaviour I do on Linux and did on Windows ~20 years ago when I last used it. Apple has the benefit of controlling both hw and sw and still manage to mess it up. Random crashes, slowdowns for long running sessions, crappy UI (eg those labels not checking their checkboxes in Settings), network weirdness (…

You haven't used Windows in quite a while have you ? Past Windows 7 it's been sliding downhill into bullshit UX, crapware, backend migration to Linux almost exclusively, etc. Random things on top of my head : MacOS doesn't come with candy crush, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify etc. prepopulating your start menu. Phone home telemetry and ads in OS ? Yummy Dealing with Windows dev environment is always a PITA eventually - u…

Linux works more often for me than Mac, but I also have two decades of experience using it, so it may just be that I am more comfortable.

With so many webtech-apps (Slack, Google calendar...) and non-native UI browsers (Firefox/Chrome), visual consistency is lost anyway, so I stopped caring (the best experience I had was with GNOME in 2.* early HIG/a11y days when I used Epiphany as the web browser) — oh yeah, I use Emacs too, so there's that :)

Still, most common Mac-as-Linux approach with Docker Desktop is an incompatible emulation layer (eg. local UIDs are transformed into root UID on Mac, whereas they are not on Linux, so you get weird permission errors if you develop on Mac and rebuild/redeploy on Linux).

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#363

Post by stjohnswarts »

anthk wrote: post #167
armchairhacker wrote: post #166

Does Linux have this backwards compatibility? What about macOS? I know instruction sets changed from PowerPC to Intel to ARM, so probably not macOS at least. But this is a CLI and I doubt old system calls changed

Linux will just compile 30 yo binaries.

30 yo source code?

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#364

Post by xen0 »

belltaco wrote: post #242
failuser wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My claim is that Microsoft operating system was silently detecting competitors software and changing behavior to break compatibility. That is proven. The war on WordPerfect was equally shady. Did Microsoft clean its act at some point and stopped doing so? They force Edge at every opportunity, so even the behavior that almost got them forcefully partitioned is back. I don’t think we have caught them outright sabotagin…

> My claim is that Microsoft operating system was silently detecting competitors software and changing behavior to break compatibility. That is proven That's a false claim. That code was in a beta and never shipped. You're just spreading FUD..

The code was shipped, just disabled.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#365

Post by xen0 »

lamontcg wrote: post #149
knallfrosch wrote: post #20

See also https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Win…

From where I'm sitting this looks like an excellent argument for breaking backwards compatibility. All those bullshit hacks are a maintenance and debugging burden for someone and a tax on the whole rest of the operating system -- and I'd argue that it really shows.

When your favourite program stops working after an OS update, who do you blame? If you really want that program to run, what do you do?

There are business reasons to maintain backwards compatibility, and they were very strong before the easily updated software.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#366

Post by CoolCold »

darklycan51 wrote: post #188
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All those bullshit hacks are a maintenance and debugging burden for someone That’s why that someone is getting paid -it’s their job. If you want software to power important things in society, like transport and energy, you need to have a certain level of responsibility for reliability. As this post demonstrates, Right now we have immature children who are used to breaking things for the sake of a new fad, in charge…

This really bothers me and I'm young, I am TIRED of applications FORCING restarts, and other garbage as a software culture. You are doing something? Oh sorry our developer team thought it would be smart to crash your whatever task you are doing by force to give you a 2 line changelog. Typing a dm on discord or talking to people? boom random restart to force update, using firefox nightly? sorry you cannot use it as yo…

> using firefox nightly? sorry you cannot use it as your main browser because they can decide to brick your browser randomly to force you to restart.

I'm on Firefox beta for a year or so and never seen this - it politely shows update notice and that's all. Updates itself once I close all open windows of FF. Wonder why Nighly do different things here. From another side - running nightly is expected to be not the same smooth as stable release.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#367

Post by CoolCold »

xvilka wrote: post #261
ohgodplsno wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're sitting on the point of view of a software developer. Microsoft's point of view is that the underlying software doesn't matter. The user's software _has_ to run. The Application Compatibility Database ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/devnotes/app... ) is, overall, a relatively small component, and all it does is apply some shims if your executable is in that list. Performance issues in Windows…

Fork and IO performance are major problems when porting *nix software to Windows. It's visibly slower, one of the reasons WSL1 was way too slow to be used for many things while technically being a clever solution.

to my understanding it's not really IO (reading/writing bytes), but overhead on OpenFile/CloseFile being under AV/Defender inspection. I'm taking that understanding basing on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 with " "NTFS really isn't that bad" - Robert Collins (LCA 2020) "

> Why was rustup slow (3m30s to install (not including download time)) in early 2019 on Windows, and why isn't it slow (14s to install) now?

>Early in 2019 I was developing some things in Rustlang on Windows, got frustrated at the performance of rustup (the installer for rust) and looked for bug. I found one which blamed a combination of NTFS, small files and anti-virus software for the problem. This wasn't an entirely satisfactory answer to my mind. Fast forward a bit, and with a combination of changes to rustup and to Windows itself and rustup is now pleasantly usable.... which also improved performance for rustup on NFS mounted home directories.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#368

Post by justsomehnguy »

kmoser wrote: post #191

I have a command line Windows binary compiled over 30 years ago (June 1996) that won't run on Windows 10 (64 bit). Windows complains, "ANAGRAMS.EXE is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information and then contact the software publisher." Is this issue specific to Windows 10, and would it work on Windows 11?

> is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information and then contact the software publisher

You would receive such response on the every 64-bit Windows starting from Win2003, there is no 16-bit NTVDM in 64-bit systems.

If you need to run it:

a) use 32-bit Windows 10 (Win11 do not have 32-bit variant)

b) use DOSBox

c) ... VirtualBox/PCem/whatever with 'real' DOS.

d) there are some NTVDM ports for 64-bit systems, use at own risk. Ctrl+F in this post.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#369

Post by tinus_hn »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #359
tinus_hn wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be because it’s an incentive to create a new, up-to-date app.

Not if the developer isn’t around anymore.

In a world with only one developer, yes. In the real world, where other developers can create new apps that do the same thing better, more secure, easier or in a more modern way, no.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#370

Post by gbin »

lamontcg wrote: post #310
pseudosavant wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the reference for it here, but in the first year Windows Vista was out >50% of crashes were due to buggy nVidia drivers. Microsoft assumed (incorrectly) that their ecosystem would get their shit together automatically. That nVidia would make solid drivers for the new Windows WDDM driver model. The year before Windows 7 came out I was working at a company (DivX ;-) making Windows software. We were getting…

Microsoft got to burn those kinds of resources on the compatibility problem due to having had a near-monopoly on the desktop back in those days. That isn't going to be repeatable for pretty much any other software company other than a FAANG, and certainly not of open source projects, not even Linux. People don't pay enough to open source for that kind of support.

It is true for the kernel though. Linus has a strict non regression (of the user code) rule. If some user code starts to break because of a kernel change, the kernel team takes the blame no question asked.
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