I've done such ports before - from 8 bit DOS to 16 bit Windows then to 32 bit Windows. How many OS API calls does an accounting package make? I'd have thought that most if not all of what it wanted to do could be done through the RTL of whatever language it is built from and a handful of third party libraries. Something like this would require a MAJOR re-write. with changes in tax law), whilst the new system is being developed. If they have to invest 3 - 5 years of development to get a replacement up to the feature specification of the old software, that is 3 - 5 years where you either need twice as many programmers or you cannot support and extend your old system (E.g. From a user perspective, it is a crap situation, but I've seen enough old systems kept crawling along to not condemn them out of hand. Without knowing the background, it is impossible to say if they were just dragging their feet or whether dropping the product completely is the more economical solution. One of the biggest problems was that some of the code was bought-in from a company that went bankrupt in 1996, so there was no expertise for it and no real way to port it to something newer. In the end, the lack of RAID drivers for modern hardware for the old SUSE forced them to address the problem, but it took a lot of effort and they had to put a freeze of new features and customer requests for over 2 years, because the whole programming staff was busy converting the system to the new version. It was so wonky that the company was selling complete systems in 2015 based on a version of SUSE from 1999/2000, because the code "just about worked" and the programmers were too scared to address the issue of porting it to a more modern version of Linux. I've seen code written in the 90s that was just patched together. Chances are it isn't even written in Object C or Swift, it is probably written in COBOL, Lightspeed Pascal or something similar, with a bunch of kludges to keep it running on PowerPC OS X and then on Intel. It can often be very difficult, if you have an old, legacy codebase. Re: How can it take MULTIPLE YEARS to go 64 bit?
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