As an experiment, I gave the source zip file to Claude and told it to make a WASM version of the app, by translating the Pascal to Go.

It nailed it, first try.

I cannot, unfortunately, share a link to the website it created because of the license.

LLM translations of historical software to modern platforms is a solved problem. Try it, you'll see.

I used https://exe.dev/ and their Shelley agent to drive Claude. Give it a try, it is jaw dropping.

Can you post a video demonstrating you using it?

https://exe.dev has a nifty private sharing feature, contact me in email and you can see it.

That's a bit of an extraordinary claim: what did Claude do about the important non-Pascal parts: the resource fork and the 68k assembly?

Look I understand it's crazy, but it took one small prompt and I came back a half hour later expecting it to have given up, but instead I saw exactly what you'd expect to see in my browser.

Here is the prompt I gave it:

"Use wasm and go and a 68000 emulator to get the Photoshop 1.0.1 software at https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/source/photoshop-v.1.0... to run correctly. You should not require an operating system, instead implement the system calls that Photoshop makes in the context of wasm. Because Go compiles to wasm, you might try writing some kind of translator from the pascal to go and then compile for wasm. Or you might be able to find such a thing and use it."

You can give it a try yourself, or contact me for a private link to it (see the CHM license for why I can't make it public).

Would traveling to the past in order to put in place a preemptive fix for this outage be wise or dangerous?

Asking for a friend.

Tell your friend that this course of action failed, as us in the present are still experiencing issues.

Well, that's _this_ timeline. Other timelines never had an outage.

Not with Terminator rules…

Very unproblematic. Your travelling back will land you in a freshly branched universe with no way back to the one you came from, so no worries there.

I couldn't comment on the causal hazards but since time is currently having an outage they've got an improved shot at getting away with it. I say go for it.

Safety not guaranteed.

Wow, this is so neat. I spent some time thinking about this problem years ago, and never thought of such an elegant solution.

strace (8).

I prefer Go's solution to this problem. Just don't deprecate stuff. And to make that possible, slow down and design stuff you will be willing to support forever.

Go does deprecate stuff. It just never removes it.

Go's GC is not generational.

It's not, but joining the two comments together sync.Pool is often close to what you want for a subset of cases, and it's sort of a locality biased generational storage (without actually providing you strong long-term guarantees that it is that).

The author is confused about how performance tuning works. Step one, get it right. Step two, see if it's fast enough for the problem at hand.

There is almost never a step three.

But if there is, it's this: Step three: measure.

Now enter a loop of "try something, measure, go to step 2".

Of the things you can try, optimizing GC overhead is but one of many options. Arenas are but one of many options for how to do that.

And the thing about performance optimizations are that they can be intensely local. If you can remove 100% of the allocations on just the happy path inside of one hot loop in your code, then when you loop back to step two, you might find you are done. That does not require an arena allocator with global applicability.

Go gives realistic programmers the right tools to succeed.

And Go's limitations give people like the author plenty of ammunition to fight straw men that don't exist. Tant pis.

Step 3 is always useful (if not necessary) once you reach a certain scale.

And shockingly enough, the EU has been investing in this technology for a while. Check out OIDC4VCI, and the selective disclosure protocols that go with it.

The Swiss citizens just approved a system like this.

Nah, those are not the droids he's looking for.

In my village's shooting club the women shoot just as well at the men, and quite a bit more consistently as well.

It’s mostly about ability to haul and dig as I understand it. I roles where you don’t need that as much strength is significantly less important