Someone really needs to develop a lightweight VM container that we can stuff software in. Like, you know how you can buy DOS games on steam, and it just gives you dosbox preconfigured to play the game?
@foone i personally am starting to think that the jvm was a good idea with an absolutely terrible implementation. wasm+wasi might possibly work as a language vm
@foone my not-so-hot take: this is what Zones were on solaris (albeit with extra steps). container+os emulation/translation layer. but needs packaging. my also-not-hot take: itanium-based x86 emulation in the 2000s. (also, docker is not this. sadly)
@foone I encountered FlatHub last week because someone was saying how bad it was—but is that kind of thing what you’re talking about? (Note I know next to nothing about FlatHub, and I’m really asking to see if I understood the point of it in the first place.)
@foone i'm not sure how useful this is outside of software as art
ime the biggest use case for "i want to run ancient software" is when you have ancient hardware, and virtualization famously does not work very well for that
@foone you can do that with docker. I know a lot of Game + Wine in docker setups. You could probably do similar with anything. For Windows you can use Windows docker containers for similar
The idea would be to have a standardized-as-much-as-possible VM interface, and then your OS can implement that. New OS just needs a new implementation.
The point is protection against compatibility problems: it should be possible to run a PC game from 1982 and a video editing program from 2005, in the same way and be sure that you'll still be able to run them in another 30 years.
@foone makes me think of the old Freedows project:
"OS that would be binary-compatible with multiple existing OSes including Windows. Based on the stanford "cache kernel" principle, it aims at providing application kernels that in turn provide functionality of Windows, Linux, MacOS or other systems, to unsuspecting applications written for these systems, all at the same time. "
Being able to containerize the VM and run on a sort of meta-kernel would be cool as hell.
@foone This is basically just Java If It Didn't Suck.
The idea behind Java was pretty much exactly this. In practice it was too advanced for its time, and by the time it was "usable" it was unusable for that purpose because of the breaking changes it took to get it to "usable" rendering the old code unusable.
@foone
I have programs from 2000 that ran fine under WinXP and Win7, but are crippled under Win10. Word 2007 runs, but Excel 2007 has to do a reconfig every time.
The issue, I think, boils down to "why don't we all agree to live by the same rules". That's an open question that's probably existed in some form since the dawn of man and I suspect isn't going to be resolved any time soon.