Comment by bigstrat2003
16 hours 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.
> 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?