[matthewdgreen]

There is a point where supporting legacy software stops being impressive and just starts to be counterproductive. I'm glad my Mac doesn't support Mac OS 8 software anymore, especially since it means I can use a much faster processor architecture.

[Gud]

These things are by no means mutually exclusive.

Apple could easily spend a few millions to support some old hackers keeping ancient software alive, they choose not to do it because they either don’t care, don’t know they can do it or don’t think it’s profitable.

[bolognafairy]

They certainly have an effect on one-another. You can’t just say “old hackers!”. ALL codebases are tied down by legacy design decisions after a long enough period of time. Microsoft’s commitment to backwards-compatibility has inarguably resulted in Windows flaws hanging around for longer than they’d otherwise need to. The argument is around whether or not it’s worth it.

You can’t throw all your engineering knowhow out the window just because you’re discussing something politically charged. This is simply how code works.

[Gud]

I don’t understand your argument. There are (presumably) basement dwellers keeping ancient gaming console emulators working on modern platforms with little more resources than free food from their mothers.

[matthewdgreen]

There's nothing wrong with emulators. I can get a 1998-era MacOS emulator today that runs in a web browser at 10x the speed of my 1998-era Mac! [1] Why would I ever need that kind of legacy support built into my modern OS kernel when I can just download a full hypervisor and stick the entire 1998-era operating system inside of it? (I wouldn't be upset if Windows included a built-in emulator for Windows 95/98 applications.)

But emulators are self-contained things. The question is not "should Microsoft support Windows 98 software in a dedicated emulator." The question is whether it's worth the architectural cost of supporting 1998-era software running in your native OS without emulation. I think there's a huge cost to that and I've worked with software developers and Microsoft OS engineers who have long stories about how hard it's been to improve Windows over the past ~30 years, because any major kernel changes would inevitably break some piece of legacy software, and that ruled them all out.

Now obviously things aren't that simple. If all we needed to do was run ~1998 code in 2025, we would of course do it in an emulator. But Windows chose continuity, i.e., they wanted to run 1998-era code in 2000, 2002, 2005 etc. when emulating the whole OS wouldn't have been a good tradeoff at all. It's that continuity that locked them into a straightjacket. My view is that Microsoft's strategy may have served them well in the past, but that tradeoff is no longer worth it.

[1] https://software.inc/

[Apocryphon]

I just want to be able to use my legacy 32-bit applications and play the 32-bit games once available on macOS… I can understand the move to 64-bit, but couldn’t they have added a backwards compatibility layer?