By: Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com), December 9, 2014 1:52 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on December 9, 2014 11:41 am wrote:
> IF your goal is to keep on using an ancient
> codebase indefinitely, then you're, more or less by definition, in the business of wanting computers
> that look exactly like what the ancient codebase targeted, only faster.
By definition most major software you are now using, be it closed or open, is pretty ancient with most codebases spanning 20+ years. A lot of it has been rewritten and improved over time but by definition they fit your description.
> Point is, new codebases
> come along as well, and THEY are willing to adapt themselves to new hardware.
Maybe, maybe not. Within Mozilla we have such a project; it's called Servo and it's a clean room implementation of a browser rendering engine using a novel language designed for making concurrent programming easier:
Servo
Servo wiki
It holds promise but it's barely past the prototype stage. The amount of work required to bring it to production quality is staggering and this is true for any reimplementation of today's large software bases. They might be replaced at some point, but it's not a given, and I'd still bet on them in the long run for the mere fact that they're the ones having more ongoing development.
> IF your goal is to keep on using an ancient
> codebase indefinitely, then you're, more or less by definition, in the business of wanting computers
> that look exactly like what the ancient codebase targeted, only faster.
By definition most major software you are now using, be it closed or open, is pretty ancient with most codebases spanning 20+ years. A lot of it has been rewritten and improved over time but by definition they fit your description.
> Point is, new codebases
> come along as well, and THEY are willing to adapt themselves to new hardware.
Maybe, maybe not. Within Mozilla we have such a project; it's called Servo and it's a clean room implementation of a browser rendering engine using a novel language designed for making concurrent programming easier:
Servo
Servo wiki
It holds promise but it's barely past the prototype stage. The amount of work required to bring it to production quality is staggering and this is true for any reimplementation of today's large software bases. They might be replaced at some point, but it's not a given, and I'd still bet on them in the long run for the mere fact that they're the ones having more ongoing development.