Software Rot

I'm looking at GTK here. Don't get me wrong, I like GTK and think it should be the preferred choice of GUI toolkit for many reasons. However, I have the same complaints a lot of people do about constant change and API compatibility issues. In some cases things need to change, but why going form 3 to 4 have menus been removed and require using other constructs? Could you at least provide a wrapper? Don't use event struct members directly, OK use accessor functions... But then you change the names and other details of the functions. It's not a "window" any more, it's a "surface" just because what? Beause Wayland calls them that? API stability is an important feature but these guys are talking about regular (say every 5 years) major version bumps that break things.

This is one of the reasons I absolutely hate Linux based development and operating systems built with it.

We all know it now as dependency hell, but what it is in fact is just a lazy shortcut for the current development that will bite you down the path. The corporate software is not a problem, because the corporate users don't care as long as it works now, in the future they will still rely on paid solutions that will continue working for them. For me, I run a local mirror of arch linux, because I don't want to connect to internet all the time to download a library that I might need or some software that I may require. I like it all here, but since I haven't updated in a while I might see some destructive update if I were to choose to update now. This should never happen, another thing that should never happen is if I were to compile an old version of some software. Time and time again, I will find a useful piece of software on github and I will naturally try compiling it, it's never easy, I will have to hunt the dependency it requires, then try compiling old versions of various libraries. It's just stupid, I wish it were easier and built smarter. Yes sometimes I want to run old software, that has no reason not to work. When you look at windows, it all works magically, well it's not magic it's just done smart. On GNU+Linux smart thinking like this is not welcome, it never has been. Instead they rely on huge amounts of people that develop this software, to perpetually update their programs for no reason, but to satisfy a meaningless number of a dependency.

I wish I could write all the business logic I write on an NES and never have to worry about requirements going bad. I guess the thing is, if you're writing anything on top of a network layer of any kind, eventually it's going to require patches unless you literally own all the wires and all the nodes in the network, like a secure power plant or some money clearing system in a bank that's been running the same COBOL since the 1960s. And since you're probably not writing code that directly interfaces with the network layer, you're going to be reliant on all the libraries that do, which in turn will be subject to change at the whims of breaking changes in language specs and stuff like that, which in turn are subject to security patches, etc.

In other words, if you need your software to live in the dirty world we live in, and not just in a pristine bubble, things are gonna rot.

Picking tools and libraries and languages that will rot less quickly however seems like a good idea. Which to me means not chaining myself to anything that hasn't been around for a decade at least.

I got royally screwed because 50-60% of my lifetime code output before 2018, and pretty much all the large libraries I had written, were in AS3. In a way, having so much code I would have maintained become forced abandonware was sort of liberating. But now, no more closed source and no more reliance on any libs I don't roll or branch and heavily modify myself.

I don't like the term "rot" - your software isn't rotting, it's exactly the same as when you last edited it. The rest of the software ecosystem didn't "rot" either, it evolved. And your old code didn't. "Extinction" seems a much better fit.

We as an industry need to seriously tackle the social and market dynamics that lead to this situation. When and why has "stable" become synonymous with "unmaintained"? Why is it that practically every attempt to build a stable abstraction layer has turned out to be significantly less stable than the layer it abstracts over?

This and Lindy Effect factors a lot into my choices for what to use for my projects. My choice for a project I want to be as maintenance-free as possible are special subsets of ASCII/txt, SQLite, Perl, Bash, PHP, HTML, JS, CSS. The subsets I choose are the parts of these languages which have persisted the longest.

Using the Lindy Effect for guidance, I've built a stack/framework that works across 20 years of different versions of these languages, which increases the chances of it continuing to work without breaking changes for another 20 years.

Nobody has a better ecosystem of “industrial marine grade code rot resistance” than Microsoft. That I can run the same .NET web app code compiled 20 years ago on a new Server 2025 is an easy experience unequaled by others. Or the same 30 year old VBA macros still doing their thing in Excel 365. There’s a company that knows how to do backwards compatibility.

Perfect little text, that article is.

Same site has this article about "bedrock platforms" which resonate deeply with me https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/

Software does not rot, the environment around software, the very foundation which owes its existence: the singular task of enabling the software, is what rots.

Let's look at any environment snapshot in time, the software keeps working like it always did.. Start updating the environment, and the software stops working, or rather, the software works fine, but the environment no longer works.

I'm not saying never to update software, but, only do it if it increases speed, decreases memory usage, and broadens compatibility.

I like things better the way they were.

I like things better now than how they will be tomorrow.

I can't remember the last time I saw a software update that didn't make it worse.

I don’t get the comparison to building a house. Houses have a ton of maintenance. You can’t build a house on steady ground and leave it unattended for 20 years either. And sometimes what you need to do is not even construction type of maintenance, it’s bills, legal paperwork, replacing old furnitures just because you grew tired of that 15 year old sofa etc.

As a software user and teacher, I think about software rot a lot. My concern is that it has a tendency to grow by addition rather than replacement. New features are added whilst the fundamental limits of the architecture are left unattended to.

The reason that Blender grew from being an inside joke to a real contender is the painful re-factoring it underwent between 2009 and 2011.

In contrast, I can feel the fact that the code in After Effects is now over 30 years old. Its native tracker is slow and ancient and not viable for anything but the most simple of tasks. Tracking was 'improved' by sub-contracting the task to a sub-licensed version of Mocha via a truly inelegant integration hack.

There is so much to be said for throwing everything away and starting again, like Apple successfully did with OSX (and Steve Job did to his own career when he left Apple to start Next). However, I also remember how Blackberry tried something similar and in the process lost most of their voodoo.

Python 2 situation opened my eyes to this. To this day I see a lot of py2 stuff floating around, especially around work environments. So much so, in fact, that I had to make scripts that automatically pull the sources of 2.7.18 and build them in the minimal configuration to run stuff.

Today we vibecode our software, so the rot is built in from day one!