Comment by janef0421
3 years ago
Is it really a reasonable goal to want an operating system to run a 27 year old binary without any modification or compatibility tool? There does need to be some way to run such binaries, but doing that by making the kernel and all core ABIs stable over several decades would make evolving the operating system very difficult. I think it would be better to provide such compatibility via compatibility layers like wine and sandboxing in the style of flatpak.
Which is also how Windows itself does it. Wanna run DOS or 16-bit binaries, you reach for an emulator.
It should be noted that 32-bit versions of Windows include support for 16-bit DOS and Win16 binaries. The last 32-bit version of Windows was Windows 10, which is still actively supported.