World of Goo Update, 10 Years Later

Re:World of Goo Update, 10 Years Later by magpi3 on Thursday May 02, 2019 @11:06AM (#19808640)

In a Linux distro you specify dependencies by library version and you are never required (as far as I know) to upgrade to a new major library revision. Games compiled for SDL1 are not required to upgrade to SDL2.

There are some absolutely ancient games (Xgalaga for example) that I used to play on Linux on 1996 that still play just fine today on my Debian machine.

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Re:World of Goo Update, 10 Years Later by badsectoracula on Thursday May 02, 2019 @05:02PM (#19812877)

Games compiled for SDL1 are not required to upgrade to SDL2, but games compiled for SDL1 will also not get any functionality introduced in SDL2 that could have been transparently made possible to them if the API wasn't broken in SDL2 - e.g. supporting alt-tab, wayland, etc.

Xgalaga works because the X11 library developers have not broken backwards compatibility. This is a good thing. This is what i'm referring to when i'm talking about a library not breaking backwards compatibility and what something like Gtk and/or Qt (and, IMO, SDL) should strive for.

EDIT: i give a more detailed example here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19813074

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