I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.

Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn’t get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    7 months ago

    Because we no longer have mainframes in computer labs. Each person now has there own machine.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      And yet I play modern games on modern hardware with X just fine. It’s been extended a little bit since the 80s.

          • PrimalHero@kbin.social
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            7 months ago

            What part of 40 year old code that is so messed up that it’s not cleanable any more do you not understand.

            • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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              7 months ago

              Of course it is. That’s propaganda. It’s hard, but possible. Probably not as hard as fighting Nvidia for 15 years either.

              • nyan@sh.itjust.works
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                7 months ago

                Simply put, no one with the necessary skills has come forward and demonstrated the willingness to do the work. No programmer I’ve ever met enjoys wrestling with other people’s crufty old code. It isn’t fun, it isn’t creative, and it’s often an exercise in, “What the unholy fsck was whoever wrote this thinking, and where did I put the ‘Bang head here’ mousepad?” So getting volunteers to mop out the bilges only happens when someone really wants to keep a particular piece of software working. It’s actually more difficult than getting people to contribute to a new project.

                So getting rid of X’s accumulated legacy cruft isn’t impossible, but I suspect someone would need to set up the “Clean up X” foundation and offer money for it to actually happen. (I’m no happier about that than you, by the way.)

                • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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                  7 months ago

                  Aye - there was definitely a lack of motivation there. It seems the X teams (XF86 and later Xorg) sorta ran out of juice at some point. Maybe Wayland has reinvigorated them since it’s much more exciting to write new code than fix old cruft.

                • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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                  7 months ago

                  clean it up yourself if you love it so much

                  Are we 12?

                  You’re telling me a project that has taken 15 years and is just now getting decent nvidia support and which may someday allow applications to position their own windows is rousing success? Compared to a rework of an existing codebase? That has all the signs of a “we bit off more than we could chew”.

                  It’ll work, in the end. But 15 years of work on a migration from X11->“X12” or something would have likely been easier. Especially if they didn’t ignore nvidia along the way.

                  • PrimalHero@kbin.social
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                    7 months ago

                    Says the guy that believes its propaganda 😂
                    Blaming the developers of wayland instead of the company, who refuses to cooperate with them. You are really smart.
                    Have you seen the codebase from x11. Multiple developers who have worked on x11 for decades say its not worth the time to fix it. It was not designed to run on modern systems. Yet here you are all knowing and you saying it they are wrong. You know better.
                    X11 is dead, get over it and move on.