> In the real world, the internet is TCP/IP
I guess he missed http3, which now makes up 35% of web traffic.
Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
11–20 of 147 posts
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#12> In the real world, the internet is TCP/IP I guess he missed http3, which now makes up 35% of web traffic.
http3 operates on a different OSI layer
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#13> In the real world, the internet is TCP/IP I guess he missed http3, which now makes up 35% of web traffic.
http3 operates on a different OSI layer
Yes, which the article claims is just a theory now, irrelevant for the real world. More crucially though, http3 doesn't use TCP because it is built on top of UDP.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#14Hasn't it taken gargantuan multi decade efforts of hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations to make it work at all, let alone well, on Linux? How is that successful cross platform?
>> How is that successful cross platform?
Because hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations made it happen, not because Microsoft wanted it but in spite of it.
In this case the route to success was via marketing (isn't it always so?), via market share, via application dominance (attracting developers to develop for the platform), and via insane levels of backward's compatibility. It was successful not because of the code itself (end users don't care 2 figs about the elegance of the code) but because they optimized for the end user experience.
Linux optimized for the experienced, technically adept user, who wanted to fiddle, customize and could write programs. Apple optimized for the "now", ignoring the past and regularly made existing programs obsolete and unrunnable.
I wrote windows programs in 1995. They still run today. They have run on all versions of Windows since then, without even a recompile. Everything I have [1] just keeps running. And it turns out, that's something users really want.
I get that we're all technical folk here. I get that we strive for technical excellence and elegance. I get that we operate in the "now", ignoring hardware and software from the past. But the market is different, and wants different things. If you want a successful business you need to understand the market, not just your own aesthetics. Microsoft understands that, and that's why the market (especially the business market) relies on them.
[1] - Except games. Copy protection on some of my games means they don't run anymore - but to be fair those were hacks designed specifically to prevent the game running in the first place.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#15kinda
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#16There's something deeply satisfying about compiling a Win32 desktop application and knowing that single binary will run unmodified on essentially every Windows machine from XP onward, and look nearly identical doing it. High-DPI is the one real caveat, but even that's manageable with a manifest. I'm not sure any other platform-native API comes close to that combination of reach and consistency. Running them on other…
I am not sure if this holds, I have witnessed apps that dont work in newer versions of Windows.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#17Hasn't it taken gargantuan multi decade efforts of hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations to make it work at all, let alone well, on Linux? How is that successful cross platform?
Hasn't it taken gargantuan multi decade efforts of hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations to make [WINE] work at all, let alone well, on Linux?
Arguably there has been equal or larger effort invested/wasted in cross-platform and cross-distro frameworks/APIs/packaging and yet the result still doesn't work. Partly that's due to duplication of effort; there's (mostly) one WINE competing with Qt/Gtk/whatever times Snap/Flatpak/AppImage/whatever.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
http3 operates on a different OSI layer
Yes, which the article claims is just a theory now, irrelevant for the real world. More crucially though, http3 doesn't use TCP because it is built on top of UDP.
It's like how people say "pass me the butter" despite there's just a tub of margarine on the table.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#19Sometimes I think that, if Java ditched the idea of JVM and followed what modern languages did today (write once, compile on every major platform), things would be different.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#20(2024) Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference. Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. They are symptoms of a desktop market that Microsoft locked hard enough that the rest of us had to reverse engineer our way out. Market damage, not collaboration. The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extin…
If you listen to CS professors you'd believe that Haskell would be very successful despite having limited if none real world usage. The reality is that catering to your users is much more important than having idealistic system.
In my experience even with games that have native Linux support running through proton seems to have less issues.