Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
You and I must have had very different experiences in those times.
> Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
It was definitely overused - nobody needs Microsoft word to be a window manager for every doc file. But it ends up growing into something really nice where you get to build out the sub windows of your IDE wherever you want them.
> OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
This was also incredible. I built one of the first tabbed web browsers by embedding instances of the IE 4 DLL into my tabs. OLE and OCX extended object-oriented programming across program and language boundaries.
> Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
This was terrific for pranks. Yeah what were they thinking on this one.
> There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
Maybe as I've aged the novelty of building programs has worn off. For some things I don't want to have to port or even recompile it. I just want it to run. If Win32 is the only stable Linux ABI, GDI is the only stable Linux GUI toolkit.
OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)