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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

The longer I work in software, the more I see parallels to DNA. Yeah, sure this parasitic chunk of blueprint seems like it doesn't do anything, but it's not harming survival of the species, and hey, maybe it will serve some important purpose to the propagation of the larger supporting organism somewhere in the long long tail of probability.

I've also adopted this truism, to help me away from pre-mature refactorings that I am prone to do: Clean code will either be discarded, or it will live long enough to get accidentally mutated into a mess that nobody wants to touch.

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My biologists friends on twitter were all up in the air about a "Vault Organelle"[0] the other day. Knocking out this organelle doesn't seem to do anything, but everyone seems to agree it must have some corner case function to still be around.

The vault is not a new discovery, but since it doesn't exist in yeast or fruit flies it has somehow not gotten a lot of attention...

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(organelle)

Hah! I had the same thought. I proposed that after Y2K we shift all the old COBOL programmers to decoding the human genome, as 30-year-old code bases are the closest thing we have.

In a few years I should make the same proposal but for all the Enterprise Java developers.

Python 3 was an attempt to remove cruft but it was drawn out and somewhat painful.

Apple on the other hand has managed to reinvent itself successfully several times by controlling its vertical tightly, and each time it does it there’s a natural shedding of cruft. I remember every single architectural move — 68k to PPC to Intel and now to ARM, executed impeccably each time. Moving a developer ecosystem with the times is truly one of the harder things but Apple seems to have managed to pull it off each time.

> Apple on the other hand has managed to reinvent itself successfully several times by controlling its vertical tightly, and each time it does it there’s a natural shedding of cruft. I remember every single architectural move — 68k to PPC to Intel and now to ARM, executed impeccably each time.

Wasn't there a recent Apple zero day due to some 56K modem code that wasn't coded correctly and had stuck around until now?

edit: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-modem-bug-since-1999/

That is not really the same. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac OS is still full of PowerPC specific code that just isn't easily identifiable as such.

It's not. NeXT was already multiplatform in the 90s.

NeXT was, but Carbon and its remnants were not produced at NeXT. Carbon is long gone, but those remnants still exist in iTunes/the various apps split off from it.

And being multiplatform doesn’t suggest the absence of platform-specific code. I’ve hypothesized recently (to some chagrin) that Apple probably still maintains a skunkworks version of macOS for PPC, as insurance. It would be silly if they didn’t, given the history. So, probably yeah there’s a bunch of PPC code in macOS, but I’d bet it’s generally quite identifiable.

I don't know why they would do that now. They're doing their own ARM thing, and the contingency would surely be more x86, even if not from Intel.

I don’t know why there would be a “the” contingency, but we know they’re also hiring for active RISC-V engineers. It’s definitely not obvious the field is as limited as that.

Yeah. Makes no sense. I loved PPC (and 68k before that) but it’s a dead platform that Apple has no interest in.

The Power ISA recently hit the front page here. It’s not a dead platform, it’s just mostly server focused.

It’s not strong on embedded, mobile or desktop, debunked by x86 and now ARM on super computer, cloud and enterprise. If it’s not dead, it’s on life support.

ARM wasn’t strong on many of the platforms it’s now running and will be soon. Apple has historically backed weak hardware platforms both to a fault and to astonishing success. Part of the way they did that was maintaining cross ISA builds internally for platforms no one would bet on.

ARM has been on the rise since its creation. Gaining market share and entering new segments.

PPC has ben bleeding costumers since Apple left the boat. Even game consoles gave up. With RISC-V on the table, competition is even harder these days.

I bet you there isn’t. It would have to be emulated, which would be too easy to spot. And there’s also no need. They’ve been using a much higher level tool chain for decades. There’s plenty of legacy code, sure, but no PPC. Rest assured.

Why would it be emulated?

Maybe we’re not taking about the same thing. You’re saying there’s PPC code running on current macOS. If it’s running on recent hardware, it’s running emulated, since Apple hasn’t shipped a PPC machine in more than a decade.

I’m saying the exact opposite: that there’s likely PPC source code in macOS still maintained just in case. I really doubt all of the Carbon remnants are ISA specific, the point of bringing that up was that macOS’s roots are not entirely NeXT and things that still exist are based on APIs largely from classic Mac OS.

I really doubt they are maintaining a PPC fork. It's not a trivial effort and it would be hard to justify the investment and even harder to motivate the talent needed.

ISA specific code is restricted to kernel and drivers. What's left of Carbon has been through 3 transitions (PPC to x86, x86 to x64 only, x64 to ARM). It's ISA clean all right.

The linux kernel is multiplatform, and is full of ISA-specific code. They are not exclusive.

In case of web apps/sites you can easily find truly dead code by inserting instrumentation/reporting in all the old workarounds and collecting it over some reasonable period of time.

Next week on hacker news "My 5 year old TV just started sending data to Google servers!"

"Yeah, we put in this special case to handle the alternate logic during leap years, but someone refactored it out!"

It works the same with bureaucracy in governments too. Stuff is too complex, so rather extend than refactor.

Nature is experimenting all the time though. Damage to DNA is random and stable and mutable parts of the DNA have an equal chance to be impacted. Beningn mutations accumulate and non-viable ones don't persist for very long. Also, accidents during cell division can cause parts of the genome to be lost.

Sometimes more extreme changes happen during cell division when genomes are duplicated. Retroviruses that manage to reach the germ line can also have a huge impact. In these cases, the new genetic material can take over entirely new functions.

Human evolution is pretty slow because of a generation time of 20 to 30 years, but in more short-lived species such as fruit flies much more interesting things can be observed. Some of these indeed remind me of software development.

https://xkcd.com/1605/

The alt text on this one is impressively glib, even coming from xkcd.

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