> For a small company, this is an enormous waste of time, money, and energy.
I think you have this backwards. A small company that writes a compiler and loses a few weeks of dev time per year survives for a decade, while spinning up various new products.
In another world, a small company rewrites its only source of revenue. 18 months later, they release the rewrite with zero new features and a chunk of new bugs and promptly die, because who's going to buy a product that spends a year and a half going backwards?
I think you have this backwards. A small company that writes a compiler and loses a few weeks of dev time per year survives for a decade, while spinning up various new products.
In another world, a small company rewrites its only source of revenue. 18 months later, they release the rewrite with zero new features and a chunk of new bugs and promptly die, because who's going to buy a product that spends a year and a half going backwards?