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A comment on 22nd Century C. Parent comment

Re:22nd Century C by user5994461 on Sunday September 11, 2016 @05:06AM (#12472573)
> Notice how smooth the 32-bit to 64-bit transition went? (and yes, it was smooth.)

I credit most of that to Microsoft and the insane efforts they make to support backward compatibility.

They made an extremely complex abstraction layer to run 32 bits applications on 64 bits OS, yet it works very well.

To this day, it's possible to run lot of applications that were written 15 years ago, seamlessly, as they were built and distributed 15 years ago.

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Re:22nd Century C by cyber_dude on Sunday September 11, 2016 @09:26AM (#12473239)
You should credit AMD for introducing AMD64/x86_64. Without that backward compatibility wouldn't have been possible.
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Re:22nd Century C by mieko on Sunday September 11, 2016 @05:24AM (#12472612)
I've heard Microsoft had a great story there, but I was drawing from experiences with the open source Unix-likes. Seems like it was across the board until you get too far into the weeds.
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Re:22nd Century C by trentnelson on Sunday September 11, 2016 @11:20AM (#12473781)
A great paper if you haven't already seen it:

https://github.com/tpn/pdfs/blob/master/A%20History%20of%20M...

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