[magpi3]

One of the claimed benefits of the JVM (and obviously later VMs) was that it would solve this issue: Java programs written in 2000 should still be able to run in 2100. And as far as I know the JVM has continued to fulfill this promise.

An honest question: If you are writing a program that you want to survive for 100+ years, shouldn't you specifically target a well-maintained and well-documented VM that has backward compatibility as a top priority? What other options are there?

[cmrdporcupine]

People routinely boot DOS in e.g. qemu. The x86 ISA is 45 years old, older if you consider the 8008/8080 part of the lineage. It's not pretty, but it's probably the most widespread backwards compatible system out there.

[elzbardico]

S/360 assembly programs probably would still run on a modern IBM mainframe. Punched cards kept in an inert atmosphere probably would last for centuries, and along with printed documentation in archival-quality paper would allow future generations to come up with card readers and an emulator to actually run the program.

[sverhagen]

While I love the JVM, and I also think it's one of the better runtimes in terms is backwards compatibility, there have been breakages. Most of the ones I've dealt with were easy to fix. But the ease of fixing is related to the access to source code. When something in a data stream is broken, be it an MP3 or a JPEG, I guess you almost inherently need special tooling to fix it (realistically). I imagine that with an SVG it'd be easier to hand-fix it.

[lmm]

> An honest question: If you are writing a program that you want to survive for 100+ years, shouldn't you specifically target a well-maintained and well-documented VM that has backward compatibility as a top priority? What other options are there?

I'd be tempted to target a well-known physical machine - build a bootable image of some sort as a unikernel - although in the age of VMWare etc. there's not a huge difference.

IMO the "right" way to do this would be to endow an institution to keep the program running, including keeping it updated to the "live" version of the language it's writen in, or even porting it between languages as and when that becomes necessary.

[mrguyorama]

Basically, just target the System/360 from IBM