Nice to hear, congratulations and thanks for your hard work. Now time for gtk4 :(
There was a time, when I was young, backwards compatibility was a big part of our job. To me, it seems every other day QT and GTK makes a point of ignoring backwards compatibility with their releases, making Application Development hard.
I admit, I do *not* understand GTK/QT development model at all. But I think having that compatibility is one of the reasons of Linux's success, the rule of "Do not break user space".
> Now time for gtk4 :(
Hopefully easier? Unsure however.
> But I think having that compatibility is one of the reasons of Linux's success, the rule of "Do not break user space".
Quite. Of course, it's a sometimes repeated joke that the Linux GUI toolkit with the most binary compatibility is the Win32 API (via Wine).
Windows backwards compatibility is also pretty phenomenal if you know what you're doing.
There was an article a couple of years ago about taking binaries from either windows 1 or 2, changing a few bits of the header and it would run fine.
Edit: actually it's covered in the Wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0x
It's an old citation but here's the snippet:
"Due to Microsoft's extensive support for backward compatibility, it is not only possible to execute Windows 1.0 binary programs on current versions of Windows to a large extent but also to recompile their source code into an equally functional "modern" application with just limited modifications"
I haven't touched windows in probably 15 years though so I can't speak for any of this. Funny, I was a Windows software developer for a decade and now I know nothing about it. I don't even know if the debug tools I used to use made the leap to 64 bit
>It's an old citation but here's the snippet:
Really old citation, 1995...
>There was an article a couple of years ago about taking binaries from either windows 1...
The below article seems to go more indepth and was written in 2020, might even be the one you were thinking of:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/05/10/1753203
>As previously noted, Windows 95 dropped support for 1.x and 2.x binaries. The same however was not true for Windows NT, which modern versions of Windows are based upon. However, running 16-bit applications is complicated by the fact that NTVDM is not available on 64-bit installations.
>After letting NTVDM install, a second attempt shows, yes, it is possible to run Windows 1.x applications on Windows 10 [32-bit].
>FONTTEST also worked without issue, although the TrueType fonts from Windows 3.1 had disappeared.