Using dmd on older machines

[Tomas Lindquist Olsen]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Michel Fortin
<michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:
> On 2009-03-11 04:50:37 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com>
> said:
>
>> The source works just fine. The binaries don't. The new lib distros don't
>> include the old lib, and vice versa. Often the missing lib isn't available.
>> It's an ongoing nuisance.
>>
>> It isn't like Windows, where the basic api's have been unchanged for
>> nearly 20 years.
>>
>> Mac OSX is the worst of the lot, there you get a "bus error" if you build
>> for 10.5 and run it on 10.4.
>
> Yeah, the error message is bad. But on Mac OS X if you build for 10.4
> (either by building on 10.4 or using the 10.4 SDK bundled with Xcode) it'll
> be forward-compatible with the newer versions of Mac OS X yet to come. For
> instance, I can run apps compiled on 10.0 quite well on 10.5, with no
> tweaking at all. Seems on Linux if you choose the old lib it won't run on
> the newer distos. That looks worse to me.

This is usually not a problem as most linux software is free (as in
freedom) and has open source code though.

Commercial applications can simply provide multiple binaries. Just
like the situation is getting for XP/Vista as well (I know, it's only
really games, and it's not really the same situation, but anyway ...)

DMD source code being available is a good start, but as I understand
it, Linux distributions are still not allowed to redistribute it ? Or
binaries of a modified source build ?

-Tomas

>
> --
> Michel Fortin
> michel.fortin at michelf.com
> http://michelf.com/
>
>