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Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

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21–30 of 147 posts

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#21
post #11

> In the real world, the internet is TCP/IP I guess he missed http3, which now makes up 35% of web traffic.

Technically the Internet runs on "the Internet Protocol Suite" but people just say "TCP/IP" for short. That doesn't mean to exclude UDP, SCTP, or whatever.

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#22
post #3

(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…

> "...embrace-extend-extinguish against Java..."

Early Java was horrid for everybody except the architecture astronauts who could cram ten GoF design patterns into a hello world program. It only got traction because a different wannabe monopolist, Sun Microsystems, spent heavily to get it pushed into CS curriculums. Fortunately, the one-two punch of Linux and Intel killed Sun or we might all be cursing them today instead of Microsoft.

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#23
post #21
post #11

> In the real world, the internet is TCP/IP I guess he missed http3, which now makes up 35% of web traffic.

Technically the Internet runs on "the Internet Protocol Suite" but people just say "TCP/IP" for short. That doesn't mean to exclude UDP, SCTP, or whatever.

So what exactly does he mean then?

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#24
post #19

Sometimes 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.

What's even sadder is that was built and Sun fought against it because they were worried that devs would only compile for Win32.

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#26
post #23
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically the Internet runs on "the Internet Protocol Suite" but people just say "TCP/IP" for short. That doesn't mean to exclude UDP, SCTP, or whatever.

So what exactly does he mean then?

He means the Internet runs on the Internet Protocol Suite and not the "superior" OSI Protocol Suite (that people under age 50 have never heard of because it failed).

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#27
post #16
post #2

There'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.

They exist but they’re in the minority. Compare this with the Linux world, where userspace compatibility between one major distro release and the next, 12 months apart is very much a roll of the dice.

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#28
post #24
post #19

Sometimes 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.

What's even sadder is that was built and Sun fought against it because they were worried that devs would only compile for Win32.

The trouble there is that Sun was right about that.

Doing it that way works great for open source where anyone can recompile the software for a new target, but for proprietary software they would have given you a Windows blob and that's about it.

Meanwhile the problems with Java were mostly not the JVM. Its current problem is, of course, Oracle.

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#29
post #3

(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…

> Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability.

I emphatically disagree. It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32. This has absolutely nothing to do with what Microsoft locking down the desktop market. It has 100% literally everything to do with Linux userspace being a clusterfuck of terrible design.

Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked. They didn't have to. They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck. But that's quite hard.

So yeah. I emphatically, but respectfully, disagree with your entire thesis.

Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

#30
post #3

(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…

> Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. I emphatically disagree. It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32. This has absolutely nothing to do with what Microsoft locking down the desktop market. It has 100% literally everything to do with Linux userspace being a clusterfuck of terrible design. Linux adopted Win32 because it a…

> Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked.

Completely untrue - Linux "adopted" Win32 because the majority of video games are written for Windows (and thus Win32).

They could not have invented a better API because the entire reason Proton exists is because developers don't build native Linux games.

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