Hyrum’s Law in Golang

Weren’t there a couple of anecdotes where Windows couldn’t fix a bug because some popular game (maybe SimCity?) depended on it, so the devs hardcoded a SimCity check inside Windows and made the bug happen if it was running?

It was not a bug in windows, it was a bug in SimCity: it would UAF some memory, but the Windows 3.x allocator did not unmap / clear that memory so it worked.

Windows 95 changed that, and so one of the compatibility shims it got is that the allocator had a 3.x adjacent mode, which would be turned on when running SimCity (and probably other similarly misbehaving software as well).

Nowadays this is formalised in the compatibility engine (dating back to windows do), which can enable special modes or compatibility shims for applications (windows admins trying to run legacy or unmaintained applications can manage the application of compatibility modes via the “compatibility administrator”).

Still a pretty good example of having to support something which is definitely not part of the official spec.

Had it been open source, they could have just fixed the software instead

Fixing the upstream would not have updated it on the millions of machines running it, which is what they wanted to not break.

> Fixing the upstream would not have updated it on the millions of machines running it,

It was a very different world back then. You couldn't even assume a dial-up connection.

Nowadays, the software would have been automatically updated for 99% of the machines running it, whether they wanted that update or not.