|
|
|
|
|
|
by praptak
879 days ago
|
|
|
A relevant quote about the lenghts they went to to assure stuff not getting broken: "Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii... |
|
|
Today patches are near constant so a "simcity.exe" might represent hundreds of different versions of the code. It's much harder to maintain exceptions since the list of cases is much larger. Even if your test harness is embarrassingly parallel your results are only as accurate as the latest version available to test.
None of that is impossible but there's additional non-zero costs involved in maintaining compatibility exceptions. At some point they tip over to not being worth the investment.