7 Oct
2024
7 Oct
'24
8:37 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Henry Bent via cctalk once stated:
On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 06:10, Maciej W. Rozycki via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Maybe. I downloaded Viola, an early-90s graphical web browser (around 30
years old), and while it did compile on two different Linux systems (My God!
It's full of warnings!), it ran (for various values of "run") on the 32-bit
system, and immediately crashed on the 64-bit system (because sizeof(int) ==
sizeof(long) == sizeof(char *)).
It was written just *after* C89 came out, and it shows.
-spc
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.