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Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

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

#31

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #22
gregman1 wrote: 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 i…

Sun was actually a decent company once upon a time. Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money for so long that their hardware stopped being competitive, so that by the time Java made it so you could run some software on it, nobody wanted their hardware regardless.

It was only after they went bankrupt and got bought by Oracle that things like OpenSolaris getting killed off and Java lawsuits started happening.

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

#32

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #29
gregman1 wrote: 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…

> It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32

Studios don't target Linux, they target Windows and sometimes Mac.

Imagine if Flappy Bird targeted only iPhone, because there were only 50,000,000 Android users in the world (hardly worth supporting). Then Android creates an iPhone runtime on Android so people can play Flappy Bird on it, and you conclude "iPhone actually worked, this is evidence that Android is a hilarious and catastrophic failure."

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

#33

Post by forrestthewoods »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #30
forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> because developers don't build native Linux games.

Correct. However you grossly misunderstand why why dev don't build native Linux games. The answer is that distributing proprietary software that works on "Linux" is an absolute unmitigated clusterfuck of pain, misery, and woe.

Cross-platfrom is very very easy. It's a solved problem. There are indie devs with custom engines that can easily ship for Windows, macOS, iPhone, Android, Playstation, Switch, and Xbox.

If Linux userspace had an ABI that wasn't garbage then adding "Linux" to that list would be very easy. The fact that devs don't and it is your primary clue.

I keep putting "Linux" in quotes because back in the day with r/LinuxGaming would spam Kickstarters begging for Linux support that's what they asked for. Of course there is no such thing as shipping for Linux. There is the Linux kernel and glibc and a kajillion different distros that are all unique and terrible in an myriad of different ways.

And it turns out that Linux is such a minefield clusterfuck that the actually best ABI is Win32. It'd be great if Linux designed a new ABI that was better. Seriously, that'd be awesome. But in the meantime Win32 it is!

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

#34

Post by ravenstine »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #29
gregman1 wrote: 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…

It's Linux's failure that one of the world's biggest corporations outspent it on marketing by orders of magnitude? You can sell crap like hotcakes with enough money and advertising minds. Yours isn't really an argument for Linux APIs being any worse or better quality.

> Linux adopted Win32 because it actually worked.

WINE would have been invented one way or another because enough people would have wanted to run Windows programs on Linux in a world where Linux had dominant market share. For Pete's sake, there are Commodore 64 emulators for Linux in a world where that system has been dead for decades. It has nothing to do with what "works" or not. WINE and Proton are developed as actively as they are today because Microslop has been able to market so effectively to convince average joes and businesss leaders to buy their crappy OS. This has nothing to do with the quality of APIs.

> They could have simply invented a better API that didn't suck.

Is there ever a situation where this statement isn't true? Everything built in software can be seen as sucking, and all software could have been written better the first time around.

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

#35

Post by forrestthewoods »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #32
forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It is a hilarious and catastrophic failure of Linux userspace that the best API for running games on Linux is Win32 Studios don't target Linux, they target Windows and sometimes Mac. Imagine if Flappy Bird targeted only iPhone, because there were only 50,000,000 Android users in the world (hardly worth supporting). Then Android creates an iPhone runtime on Android so people can play Flappy Bird on it, and you concl…

I don't need to imagine a made-up scenario that doesn't make sense. We can look at what has happened at face value.

The calculus is very very very boring and simple. Game devs will support every single platform on the planet in which the cost to support that platform - both directly and long-term maintenance - is less than the increased revenue that platform provides.

It is not uncommon for indie games on custom engines to support Windows, Playstation, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox. And, depending on the game, iOS or Android. Sometimes macOS although that's increasingly rare.

Native Linux builds are pretty rare. Especially before Proton got pretty good with Steamdeck release.

Supporting Linux is a monumentally tremendous pain in the ass. Radically more than literally any other platform. It is hands-down the hardest and most painful to support natively. So painful that emulating Win32 is a clear win. Valve's runtime helps a lot. And supporting another path is just a waste of time.

Very sad!

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

#36

Post by modeless »

gregman1 wrote: 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…

The point is not that Win32 is exemplary. The point is that it's compatible. More compatible, in some cases, than native apps for non-Windows platforms. A Win32 binary that runs in Wine is likely to work on more Linux distros than a native Linux binary, due to decisions made by glibc and distro maintainers over the years.

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

#37

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #31
ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " ...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 i…

Sun was actually a decent company once upon a time. Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money for so long that their hardware stopped being competitive, so that by the time Java made it so you could run some software on it, nobody wanted their hardware regardless. It was only after they went bankrupt and got bought by Oracle that things like OpenSolaris getting killed o…

> "Their problem was that Microsoft excluded them from the market and starved them for money..."

That is not what happened. Sun Microsystems had immense revenue and clout in the server and enterprise space because of the dotcom boom, so much so that their advertising declared "We're the dot in dotcom." Microsoft was trying to duke it out with them in the server space but Windows Server was just barely starting to become decent at that point so MS didn't get all that much traction.

When the dotcom bust hit, Sun went into a tailspin because of the glut of Sun server hardware from dead dotcoms at bargain basement prices. That eventually passed but by that time Linux + Intel was good enough to undercut both Sun and Microsoft in the server space. With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.

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

#38

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #27
dbacar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true.

To be fair, if you use only the Linux syscall interface, then a program that you compiled on x86 in the 90s will probably still run anywhere today. Linus is adamant about this.

But if you want to use... anything else, then it's unlikely to work at all unless you are very specific about your target. There isn't one company deciding that glibc or mesa or whatever is binary backward compatible on every kernel for every platform forever. Microsoft is, somewhat, one such company. That's why System32\*.dll have such stable interfaces -- it's their job to translate whatever late 90s system/graphics facilities some boomer dreamed up into whatever the current Windows hodgepodge of system services support. It's no wonder Microsoft is trying to drop support for hardware like crazy.

This implicit compatibility isn't true for all Windows programs, though. Consider Visual Studio. Couldn't compile my console program on my computer and run it on my dad's computer. He had to first install the "Redistributable," which for him and most people might as well be a rootkit and a super scary virus program bad guy.

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

#39

Post by jsiepkes »

ThrowawayB7 wrote: post #22
gregman1 wrote: 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 i…

None of your opinion on Java changes the fact that Microsoft used it's monopoly to execute an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy on Java. It is well documented since they lost an anti-trust court case on it [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

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

#40

Post by notepad0x90 »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #5

Hasn'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?

It is successful because it succeeded. Not because how it succeeded with right, great or ideal. People in this thread keep confusing these two points.
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