this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
499 points (98.4% liked)

Technology

59672 readers
2785 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Potential solutions:

  • move to web-based SW - platform-agnostic, so it's pretty easy to support other OSes (oh, and you get mobile almost for free)
  • start submitting patches to get stuff working on macOS and Linux - once the barrier to supporting other OSes is low enough, they may let you officially support it
[–] sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I get that there are solutions to the problem, but there's no way a team of 10 can port 35 years of win32 dependence and keep the business solvent. Maybe incrementally, over the course of 10-15 years. We're just now migrating off of .NET 4.8 because we use WCF so much.

Depending on the implementation, WCF can be really easy to adapt to new clients. If you wanted to support Linux, macOS, or web, you just implement the part of your service that make sense for those platforms.

I obviously don't know your app at all, but it sounds like a 10 person dev team could probably build a new app in just a few months since the backend is already there. It wouldn't have all of the features, but generally speaking it's a lot easier to rebuild an app than refactor an existing one. Whether that would bring value is another concern entirely.