Comment on dotnet developer
dan@upvote.au 9 months agosome legacy software checked if the OS name began with “Windows 9” to differentiate between 95 and future versions.
This is a myth. Windows doesn’t even have an API to give you the marketing name of the OS. Internally, Windows 95 is version 4.0 and Windows 98 is 4.1. The API to get the version returns the major and minor version separately, so to check for Windows 95 you’d check if majorVersion = 4 and minorVersion = 0.
0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Maybe it’s a myth, but it sure sounds plausible. The software that checks the “Windows 9” substring doesn’t even have to exist for this to be reason they chose to skip to version 10 — they just had to be concerned that it might exist.
Sure, maybe there’s no C function that returns the string, but there’s a
vercommand. It would be trivial to shell out to the command. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver_(command)This doesn’t prove anything, but there are a TON of examples of code that checks for the substring. It’s not hard to imagine that code written circa 2000 would not be future proof. sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+"\"window…
dan@upvote.au 9 months ago
oh
oh no
There’s code in the JDK that does that??
I really wish I didn’t see that.
0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Yup!! Never look under the hood in software, you’ll just be disappointed ☹️
dan@upvote.au 9 months ago
I’ve been a software developer for 20 years and this comment is too real. Some days I’m amazed that any software even works at all.