Windows 10 as a development environment... Oh freakin' goody.
📍Multi-montor is finicky
📍Text scaling is still horribly broken
📍It takes longer to resume from standby than my old laptop takes to boot up from a cold start
📍Color matching LCD monitors is pants-on-head retarded
📍32GB of RAM isn't going to be enough...

This is going to be a long summer in corporate land.

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

Okay, my initial revulsion for ABI has receded. All things considered, my options aren't that bad. I just had to change my perspective from "huge downgrade from static linkage" to "huge upgrade from a message channel".

Just like a web API, I have to draw a continuous line through the program that separates specific concerns of interest that must fall on one side or another, and which can only cross through things with specific properties.

There are several crates shipping a number of different binary-compatible types, even generic types. Not everything can cross, sure, but maybe not everything should cross either. Maybe a DLL should receive an opaque handle for certain things, such as interpreter internal code representations. Maybe having these separated is important enough to justify having a translation layer.

I'm sure there's much woe ahead, but I'm learning to stop worrying and love the ABI.