Gregory's ServerSomeone 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?
That, but for all software on all OSes
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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 Well, we did have Java, and Flash. Both made the mistake of object loading from the network which made them instant virus loaders. WASM is New Safer Java but dumb because it's built in a web browser.  @mdhughes, I'm assuming that by “it's”, you mean “it is” rather than “it has”…  @Smoljaguar @foone kragen also wrote on this a lot: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/uvc-archiving.html  That's a solution for a different problem - letting you write games/other software now that can run on many machines in the future. (Also its capabilities and performance are strictly limited by design, which is totally legit.) I think what Foone is dreaming of is more like a super-duper version of VMWare or other hypervisor, to let you run *existing* software targeted to any OS, under any other OS/hardware. And hell yeah that would be a huge step forward. @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 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  this is isomorphic with the concepts behind atomic linux, kinda, and a lil like Tails...seems it ought to be doable if a reasonable machine management interface were available so you don't need to be a weird systems entity to configure it  @foone #FirstThought: What OS/2 specific game are you trying to run on a newer OS? @foone there are now <current Linux epoch time> standards for lightweight VM containers.  @foone@digipres.club sounds like unikernel  @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 mind you it's still super worth it to preserve art but it's not useful for _all software_. regretfully.  |
@foone something like... docker ?