[Cockbrand]

TIL that on macOS, both `gcc` and `clang` are present, but `/usr/bin/gcc` is in fact just a hard link to `/usr/bin/clang`. So I couldn't compile it with gcc (which is clang) on the Mac, but it compiles just fine with gcc on Linux.

It's really astonishing that we can compile 35 years old code with our current tooling. I somehow doubt that we'll be able to compile 35 years old Java/Go/Rust/... code without changes in the futue.

[epcoa]

Java is in that age ballpark and code with a similar level of dependencies as this of that vintage works just fine. Java has a solid backward compatibility story. The Java standard runtime also comes with much more than the C library so I’d say it’s better.

[arp242]

That's surprising! But I kind of get why they do that, as so many tools hard-code "gcc" rather than using "cc" or "$CC".

I'm not all that familiar with Java or Rust, but Go is very compatible; it's hard to predict the future, but it's already a third on its way to "35 years of compatibility".

JavaScript is pretty compatible as well; crummy JS from the 90s typically still works today (arguably it's compatible to a fault, with things like arr[-1] not being fixed).

[DeathArrow]

C was designed to be portable.