I do like the way Rust has language editions which let you work around this, at least partially.
Mostly though I don't care if we break old stuff. It happened all the time when developing for the desktop. People just dealt with it. The ones most impacted are lazy enterprises and I have no sympathy for them.
The loss of being unable to access old information is unknowable and therefore infinite. People can't just "deal with it." Every year there is more technical baggage that someone new to the environment is just supposed to learn. At some point it becomes an impregnable barrier.
If you start telling people they have to install an obsolete web browser, and then an obsolete operating system, and then patch the drivers because all the hardware doesn't support it anymore, you have effectively gatekept information that was once available in the open web to the tech elite.
Yes, "tech" is redone from scratch every 6 months so 5 years ago is an eternity, but there are plenty of fields where 30 year old information is just as invaluable as something published today.
Nobody is maintaining webpages published in the 90's. Nobody is going to update them. They are just there, sitting on some university's server that barely gets any hits. The author probably died 12 years ago and nobody even remembers who is responsible for it or that it's running. And it's in everyone's best interest to keep it that way: online.
That's specifically an example of an application that I think is slow. It's slow to load and often slow to respond. The support for Git has to be amongst the slowest of any professional application in the world. But I'm pretty sure it has a deeply flawed architecture compared to VSCode.
It's written in C++ and .NET Framework. VS is mostly an exception anyway. I much prefer to use VS Code + Rider instead. Your comments leave me with impression that you are not interested in understanding the performance profile of .NET and are looking to engage in a language flamewar instead.
Edit: I stand corrected, based on reply in a sibling comment most of the perception stems from how .NET Framework works. Understandable.
I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand it's great that people can write software without any financial friction, on the other I think developers should be rewarded for their work and I have little doubt the remote objects tools wouldn't exist without some kind of commercial reward.
I had a client with a C++ application that used COM for everything. They wouldn't write a simple C++ class or structure but rather would always fire up the wizard in Visual Studio to create a COM object. It was horrendous.
Having said that COM itself wasn't that bad. If you read the Don Box book he justifies pretty much all the technical decisions they made.
In the end my productivity doubled when I shifted from C++/COM to C#/.Net.
It would no doubt have an effect, but availability of firearms is probably the biggest factor. School shootings in my country (where gun ownership is strictly controlled) are almost non-existent, but definitely reported on when they occur — probably more so for the very reason they are so infrequent.
This is probably optimistic - they're a meme, kids don't need to see reporting about new school shootings to get the idea that shooting up your school is the way to go, it's something communities are quite naturally propagating amongst themselves - but it seems super clear that they wouldn't have become a meme in the first place without repeated breathless scandalising reporting.
Mostly though I don't care if we break old stuff. It happened all the time when developing for the desktop. People just dealt with it. The ones most impacted are lazy enterprises and I have no sympathy for them.
Clinging on to the past stifles innovation.
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