Hacker News Reader

Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Windows 2000 was a major platform for 5+ years, so if you have a development environment on it and never moved it elsewhere, there will be lots of assumptions built-in.

As the OP mentioned they didn't have _time_ to fix it; likely 80% of the problems are hard-coded paths and such that would be relatively easy to "fix" - but the other 20% may be dependencies on things that got deprecated/removed in later versions of the build environment, and updating would take quite a bit of work.

This is one of the reasons that if you are trying to build cross-platform software (and Windows 2000/XP/98/Vista is cross platform, mind you) you should start building and testing on the various platforms early.

View on HN

> if you are trying to build cross-platform software (and Windows 2000/XP/98/Vista is cross platform, mind you) you should start building and testing on the various platforms early.

Yeah people tell me they're having problems migrating their Java 8 app to something modern and I can't understand why haven't they always been running all versions of Java in CI, including pre-releases, and just fixing the one thing a month that pops up as a problem. They can still run on Java 8, but they will know it's going to work fine everywhere, and if they find something that won't work in a future version they can engage the Java developers before they release it.

People do some of that, but Java 8 is in that weird state where it is Java for so many things that moving off of it can be incredibly hard. It took Mojang/Microsoft how many years to get Minecraft working on something that wasn't Java 8?

And that doesn't even cover the changes in the versions of Java 8 itself that break things - one even had to be reverted IIRC.

This is why you need runtime and compiler diversity in your cicd pipeline.

From the start.

Ah but we do! We test on GraalVM and OpenJDK! (heh)

Well, you chose a weird point for that example, because Java 9 is where the most Java projects break.

I don't know what you mean - if that's the case why didn't they realise that in like 2015, 2016, when these Java 9 features were added? And why haven't they been able to fix them since then?

I know about development realities, but seriously come on at some point?

Basically because Java 9 started fixing design issues, and they decided to keep Java 8 running forever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com