Comment on GOG job listing for a Senior Software Engineer notes "Linux is the next major frontier"
tempest@lemmy.ca 1 day agoHonestly if part of their job is at all trying to get old shit to run on new operating systems AI is very useful for that task.
Part of my job is keeping a 30 year old c++ application compiling and building on newer versions of Linux. LLMs have made this a far easier experience.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I don’t want to say you’re totally wrong, but I am skeptical of the benefit. Sure, maybe it works now, which is cool, but is it making changes that are maintainable? The next time someone does this is it going to work? If we just constantly have LLMs update code, when does it start breaking, and when it does is it going to be in a state someone can fix?
tempest@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Im not generally making source code changes. It’s the dependencies.
Mainly we’re talking about building very old versions of things like libpng. Making things like autoconf and configure and cmake all work is a pain in the ass as their versions slowly change.
The business would be content to let it run on Ubuntu 12 until it’s a major problem so I can’t let the perfect be the enemy of good.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Fair enough. Probably a good use case for it. I’ve found it’s pretty reliable at creating boilerplate. I just wouldn’t trust it for doing anything important.