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I made my own DOS implementation (Announce)

posted by samwdpckr, 29.03.2024, 22:31

> I think I meant older cpus are quietly deprecated due to such bugs
> (overeager speculative execution or whatever).
Actually that's more of a problem with newer CPUs. Old pre-SSE2 CPUs don't do such things.

I just find it weird when a software developer, who doesn't even write assembly, suddenly says that someone else's computer is "too old" or "too slow" and must not be "supported" anymore. If we consider that that "someone else's computer" is a turing-complete machine that has enough memory to run the program in question, and has enough computing power that its owner does not consider it "too slow", the software developer should not have the right to say that it is.

The job of the software developer is to just maintain the program, and generally when we are speaking of relatively high-level userspace programs or their libraries, they compile to older x86 hardware just fine, unless something is actively preventing it from happening. Breaking compatibility with 32-bit x86 CPUs and/or pre-SSE2 CPUs will most likely also break compatibility with many non-x86 targets.

If the software developer only does their job and maintains the program so that it works efficiently, it also saves the environment because the users don't need to buy new computers to be able to continue using the program. In that case the program also consumes less electricity on newer machines.

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