alt Hacker NewsI know a defence company that has a bunch of vaxes stored in low oxygen environments because they legally have to be able to provide software updates to firmware they’ve written for the next 20 or so years and it was written on a vax.
They had some great stories trying to get something or other running again where they had to fly one of the original designers over to hand solder a board back into action.
How we do that today is a bit of an interesting problem I don’t think they’ve convincingly solved; basically maintaining nightly builds forever — a couple 1U’s of kubernetes in deep storage ain’t gonna do it, you’re not gonna be able to solder a xeon back to life..
I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust.
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> I know a defence company that has a bunch of vaxes stored in low oxygen environments because they legally have to be able to provide software updates to firmware they’ve written for the next 20 or so years and it was written on a vax.
So uh, will these ever make it to an auction site you think?
> I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust.
Rust 1.0 is 11 years old and it's still trivial to compile Rust code from then. I doubt that will change in the next 9 years.
C is an absolute nightmare in comparison. I tried to compile some old C code I had for Nordic nRF51 chips, only a few years after the chips became available. I gave up. Broken links, missing documentation, etc. etc. I can see why other people here are saying it's standard practice to archive a VM. Not really necessary for Rust.