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Comment by sxates | Hacker News Reader

My question is - has anyone needed to refer back to the old code in the last 30 years? I can understand wanting to have the old code around for easy reference in case you need to debug the refactored version, but if no bugs have come up in the last 30 years (or even, say, the last 5), it seems pretty safe to say the new code is solid.

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Another question: is the old code even valid in any sense compared to the current code? Since the original was written before 1985, then 99.9% of the people running Emacs will be running it on an OS that did not exist in any form in 1985 (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Android, etc) and the rest will be running on OSes which have changed substantially or been replaced entirely since then (SunOS->Solaris).

That's the beauty of C -- you don't have to rely on OS, so a code written 30 years ago is still working today.

Of course C relies on an OS. The point of an OS is securely mediating access to resources; a C program is going through the OS, using syscalls, in order to do stuff like 'write a file'. Which bears a certain resemblance to what this code is doing...

Let me repeat myself -- "you don't have to". C runs well on bare metal, that's why most bootloaders, kernels and low level drivers use it. Of course, you can make as many dependencies as you wish, but unlike high level languages, C doesn't rely on OS for it's core features.

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