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by Ygg2 315 days ago
> But from a user's standpoint

Not true generally. One man's engineering malpractice is another man's clever hack.

Users of Windows 95 complained that Windows 95 broke SimCity.

What did Windows 95 break? It fixed an obscure allocator bug SimCity was relying on.

Users loved Windows 95, for ""fixing"" this. How was it fixed? By introducing an obscure switch to old allocator if it detected SimCity in the app name.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-...
1 comments
bigstrat2003 315 days ago
Different users. The users that GP was accusing of malpractice would be the Maxis devs in this case, not the end users who were trying to install SimCity on their Windows 95 machine.

Microsoft has a commitment to backwards compatibility that I think is going too far, but I understand why. Raymond Chen has explained that if a user buys the new version of Windows and their programs stop working, they will blame MS regardless because they don't have any way to know it's the program's fault. So MS is incentivized to go out of their way to enable these other programs' bad behavior, because it keeps their (Microsoft's) customers happy.

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Ygg2 314 days ago
> Different users.

But same principle. Everyone loves for someone else to maintain backwards (and forwards compatibility).

> The users that GP was accusing of malpractice would be the Maxis devs in this case, not the end users who were trying to install SimCity on their Windows 95 machine

And Windows devs aren't to blame for backporting buggy allocators? If SimCity depended on buggy behavior was malpractice, what the hell is backporting bugs? Exporting malpractice?

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