<story><title>Apple Silicon and losing our legacy</title><url>https://tacit.livejournal.com/635381.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reikonomusha</author><text>One of the reasons I’m very for open-source (including all my code) is for the reason that porting is easier. It seems like the gripe should not be with Apple changing processors (or OS’s or hardware features or ...), but rather that (especially commercial) software is so fragile to medium-term environmental change. Binaries are just not very resilient artifacts, especially when they so closely depend on their surroundings. High-level programming language code, on the other hand, is much more resilient.&lt;p&gt;It’s also a reason I use Lisp: the spec doesn’t change and won’t change. Stuff runs forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssivark</author><text>Bingo! It’s boil-the-ocean level crazy to attempt to recreate the environment for a particular file, when the sensible approach would be to just have the file format and it’s reader&amp;#x2F;viewer software be open so it can be recompiled or ported to any new platform. The blame&amp;#x2F;responsibility lies not with those innovating on hardware, but those who have created brittle software systems which have no ability to adapt to the changing environment.&lt;p&gt;Yet another example of how holding binary artifacts is not functional equivalent to “owning” software.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Silicon and losing our legacy</title><url>https://tacit.livejournal.com/635381.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reikonomusha</author><text>One of the reasons I’m very for open-source (including all my code) is for the reason that porting is easier. It seems like the gripe should not be with Apple changing processors (or OS’s or hardware features or ...), but rather that (especially commercial) software is so fragile to medium-term environmental change. Binaries are just not very resilient artifacts, especially when they so closely depend on their surroundings. High-level programming language code, on the other hand, is much more resilient.&lt;p&gt;It’s also a reason I use Lisp: the spec doesn’t change and won’t change. Stuff runs forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heavyset_go</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Binaries are just not very resilient artifacts, especially when they so closely depend on their surroundings.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Depends on the platform. I can run statically compiled Linux binaries that were released 20 years ago just fine. Similarly, I&amp;#x27;m able play Windows games that were released over 20 years ago.</text></comment>