It was thus said that the Great Henry Bent via cctalk once stated: > On Mon, 7 Oct 2024 at 06:10, Maciej W. Rozycki via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > > FWIW compiling 25 years old a piece of software is even tougher, unless > > you use contemporary tools in a contemporary environment, so while the > > availability of the source code is surely always worth appreciating, the > > challenge to make them run is not any smaller. > > > > That's sort of an odd claim. I bet that you could download an arbitrary > piece of software from 25 years ago, run the configure script, and have > something working with very few tweaks. The biggest hurdle is probably > just going to be disabling all of the guardrails that modern clang/GCC > give you (implicit function declarations, implicit int, etc.). The only > real hurdle would come when trying to either compile something written for > varargs.h or something written in true K&R. At that point we're talking > about software written more like 35-40+ years ago.
Maybe. I downloaded Viola, an early-90s graphical web browser (around 30 years old), and while it did compile on two different Linux systems (My God! It's full of warnings!), it ran (for various values of "run") on the 32-bit system, and immediately crashed on the 64-bit system (because sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) == sizeof(char *)). It was written just *after* C89 came out, and it shows. -spc
