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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

> Binaries are just not very resilient artifacts, especially when they so closely depend on their surroundings.

Depends on the platform. I can run statically compiled Linux binaries that were released 20 years ago just fine. Similarly, I'm able play Windows games that were released over 20 years ago.

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Not by accident... Linux, windows and intel have put in a lot of effort to ensure this holds, specifically because binaries are so incredibly fragile — hell, you’d have the same trouble Mac is having now if you tried to swap out to AMD on any OS; or tried to swap out OS on same hardware.

Really, you should generally be under the presumption that changing anything at all could screw up anything and everything; it’s really a marvel of human engineering anytime software runs successfully

Maybe the binary runs, but for any non-trivial I/O (GUI, 3D, specialized input devices) you're still dependent on specific interfaces which are probably not the same anymore.

Case in point: try running any of the Loki Linux game ports from 20 years ago on a modern distribution...

These are examples of binaries that explicitly don’t depend on so much of their surroundings. They depend on the existence of a processor and a binary executable format, and perhaps some very basic syscalls that had no business changing.

And when your Linux environment moves to ARM?

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