Comment by schmuckonwheels
1 day ago
>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF
Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.
Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
macOS has Cocoa since 2000, which is still useable, and SwiftUI since a few years. No comparison to the mess of UI toolkits on Windows.
And what about Carbon?
Gone.
32-bit apps?
Gone.
PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old?
Forget it.
You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps!
Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today.
Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.
It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility.
I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon.
But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff.
Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
1 reply →
Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
> Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.
From my own experience things tend to keep working on Linux if you package your own userland libraries instead of depending on the ever changing system libraries. More or less how you would do it on Windows.
Except Windows isn't perfect either, I had to deal with countless programs that required an ancient version of the c runtime, some weird database libraries that weren't installed by default and countless other Microsoft dependencies that somehow weren't part of the ever growing bloat.
> 32-bit apps?
The Core 2 Duo, used in the last 32 bit Mac, was released in 2006.
> PowerPC stuff?
The last G5 PowerPCs were, similarly, discontinued in 2006.
> every 5 years.
20?
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Even WinAmp 2.0 from 1998 still runs on Windows 11.
> Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified.
Did _you_ tried ? Because i hear this mantra a lot on HN, but my experience is different. MDK ( the game) cannot _run_ on a current Windows.
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Try running windows 11 on old CPUs, or machines without secure boot / TPM 2.0.
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With GNU/Linux and BSD I just recompile. I can run old C stuff from the 90's with few flags.
Under GNU/Linux, the VB6 counterpart would be TCL/Tk+SQlite, which would run nearly the same over almost 25-30 years.
As a plus, I can run my code with any editor and the TCL/Tk dependencies will straightly run on both XP, Mac, BSD and GNU/Linux with no propietary chains ever, or worse, that Visual Studio monstruosity. A simple editor will suffice and IronTCL weights less than 100MB and that even bundled with some tool, as BFG:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/BFG
IronTCL:
https://www.irontcl.com/index.html
Good luck finding some VB5/6 runtime libraries out there without being a virii nest.
I suggest paying attention to some mac development podcasts.
What would I learn there?
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> Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK
I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.
> Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK,
Xlib and Motif are stable APIs. Qt and ... GTK on the other hand...