Question

I am looking at minimizing the future impact on a yet to be written application. I am trying to avoid any 3rd party products, and even avoid operating system specific calls. Can anybody suggest other ways of future proofing the application. The idea would be not having to rewrite major portions in 10 or 20 years, and that only maintenance (bug fixes) would ever need to be done.

Answer 1

If you want your program to keep running (on modern OSes) for that kind of time period, you’ll probably end up having to write it in only pure ANSI C (or C++). Anything else is likely to need some kind of tweaking over the years – and nobody really knows what’ll happen over the next 10-20 years.

That said, here are a few tips to minimize these kinds of problems:

1. Avoid weird dependencies. If you’re going to depend on some library, make sure it is very well-established (and thus likely to survive at least 5 of those 10-20 years), or at least open-source so you can fork it yourself if need be.
2. Avoid OS-specific calls. This will be a balancing act with 1. – you can use a wrapper library like boost or Qt or glib or what-have-you – but that would increase the chance for compatibility issues on that front.
3. Document everything. Fact is, no matter how hard you try, this program will need compatibility fixes and bug fixes, and probably feature additions too. So make life easier on that poor maintenance programmer who comes along 15 years later. 🙂