7 Oct
2024
7 Oct
'24
3:22 a.m.
On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 06:10, Maciej W. Rozycki via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
FWIW compiling 25 years old a piece of software is even tougher, unless
you use contemporary tools in a contemporary environment, so while the
availability of the source code is surely always worth appreciating, the
challenge to make them run is not any smaller.
That's sort of an odd claim. I bet that you could download an arbitrary
piece of software from 25 years ago, run the configure script, and have
something working with very few tweaks. The biggest hurdle is probably
just going to be disabling all of the guardrails that modern clang/GCC give
you (implicit function declarations, implicit int, etc.). The only real
hurdle would come when trying to either compile something written for
varargs.h or something written in true K&R. At that point we're talking
about software written more like 35-40+ years ago.
-Henry