Which is the oldest software alive still in 0.x, used by many?

Keep in mind that not all projects use the semantic versioning we typically see (ie major.minor.patch).

There’s a type of versioning called “ZeroVer” where the version is -never- to exceed 0.x.x.

https://0ver.org/

According to that site, the software ASCEND (0.9.8) was first released over 45 years ago.

I was going to say aspell (currently at 0.68 up from 0.10 on 1998-09-12) http://aspell.net/man-html/ChangeLog.html but of course the "used by many" is the debatable part of your question

Even PuTTY I would guess is not "by many" but who am I to say not having been locked to Windows for ages

gettext at 0.22 up from 0.7.1 on 1995-07-04 would certainly be in the short list https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=blob;f=...

MAME - the truly excellent everything emulator - is version 0.258, having first been released in 1997.

Whenever I see software under v1, I see developers who are afraid of commitment.

There’s nothing special about v1, there’s no reason to keep a useless zero for a decade. At some point you gotta realize you’ve been using the minor version as a major so that v0.39.0 is just v39.0

Does PuTTY identify itself as Beta? I did a sitewide search with no results [0].

In general I wouldn't read too much into the specific versions that projects choose. Some of these long-running 0.x projects may as well be using single-part version numbers, they probably just keep the 0 around because it's a tradition.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.chiark.greenend.o...

Anyone feel that the version number isn't really important?

I didn't know 1.x supported to be stable version until very recently

0 A.D.

Began in 2001, now in 0.0.26.

https://play0ad.com/

winrar 1995

Gnu hurd

Not played much, but kind of interesting - I nominate NetPanzer! Open sourced in 1999 or so, is still technically in beta at 0.9.x

I just got the last maintainer to put the code up on GH [0] and have been working on the next release, hopefully later this year. I also put some servers up and setup bots.

Sadly a couple months ago the guy emailed me saying he was very sick (he's been working on the game off and on for like 15 years and he only really writes C, I have no idea how old this guy is). He hasn't emailed me back, so I don't know if he's still alive. :( I may have to fork the game (I've also been making progress on a WASM version to play in the browser).

[0] https://github.com/netpanzer/netpanzer/tree/dev

It's not that old, but FastAPI is quite widely used and is still 0.x

Not so old (afaik, released in 2015) but React Native also is still 0.72

Grepping my dpkg list for packages which start with \s0. is fun.

aspell (currently 0.60.8) has a release note for 0.11 on Sept 12, 1998

gettext began in 1994 and is currently v0.21-11

tftp is 0.17-25 and dates back to 1981

telnet is 0.17, and its origins date back to 1969!

FastAPI lol