[inglor_cz]

"And it's really nice being able to trust that binaries I built a decade ago just run on Windows."

Wouldn't this need be solved by an emulator of older architectures?

There would be a performance cost, but maybe the newer processors would more than make up for it.

[robinsonb5]

Funny you should say that.

I have a legally-purchased copy of Return to Castle Wolfenstein here, both the Windows version and the official Linux port.

One of them works on modern Linux (with the help of Wine), one of them doesn't.

I wrote some specialist software for Linux round about 2005 to cover a then-business need, and ported it to Windows (using libgtk's Windows port distributed with GIMP at the time.) The windows port still works. Attemping to build the Linux version now would be a huge ordeal.

[Rohansi]

What older architecture? Windows has been on x86 for decades. You should be able to run any 32-bit application built 20+ years ago on modern Windows, assuming the application didn't rely on undocumented/internal Windows APIs.

[scarface_74]

If you have ever read any of Raymond Chen’s stuff, you would know that is a big “if”