Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)

retrocoding.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 147 posts

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

#101

Post by teleforce »

MaPi_ wrote: post #89
liquid_thyme wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and then some on Linux. Targeting Windows is insanely easy, because of the ABI. You compile once and you have an extremely high chance that it just works on every Windows version. Not perfect, but better than any other platform ever made. Heck I've used software from CDROMS where the binary was compiled 20 years ago and it…

>do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking But isn't this exactly what shipping on Windows looks like? I've just checked my Windows partition and there are 43 instances of sqlite dll and 16 instances of Qt5Core.dll because every program that uses those libs needs to include them in their "giant bundle of everything".

>I've just checked my Windows partition and there are 43 instances of sqlite dll and 16 instances of Qt5Core.dll because every program that uses those libs needs to include them in their "giant bundle of everything".

Oouch, I just got temporary headache just trying to read and comprehend the Windows mess that you mentioned here.

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

#102

Post by BirAdam »

pjmlp wrote: post #42
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…

Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,... I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it w…

WINE was not the first Windows on *nix implementation. Sun had Wabi which was Win16 and was also released for AIX, HPUX, and Caldera Linux.

While Linux may be a pain to release software for, had anyone been interested enough, a solution could have been found. No one cared because Windows was the market and everything else was a rounding error.

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

#103

Post by WhyNotHugo »

liquid_thyme wrote: post #67
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…

Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and then some on Linux. Targeting Windows is insanely easy, because of the ABI. You compile once and you have an extremely high chance that it just works on every Windows version. Not perfect, but better than any other platform ever made. Heck I've used software from CDROMS where the binary was compiled 20 years ago and it…

The Linux (and BSD) ecosystems are not geared for shipping binary-only software. Everything is designed for distributions to package software _from source_, so there's no stable ABI.

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

#104

Post by WhyNotHugo »

arcfour wrote: post #59
Asmod4n wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

glibc is the main reason linux on the desktop has such a low adoption rate. you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows. glibc only targets one audience, one which can recompile its apps when needed. What linux badly needs is a stable ABI for Userspace Apps, and Win32 is just that sadly.

> you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows. Sure you can! It's called AppImage or Flatpak or Snap! I'm also not sure why compiling is treated as some taboo? It's not like Windows where it's actually impossible to set up a toolchain. Your distro comes with one installed! So that means you can run a single installer file, just like in Win…

Every AppImage I've seen so far dynamically linked some libraries, and wasn't truly compatible across Linux distributions.

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

#105

Post by WhyNotHugo »

Asmod4n wrote: post #62
arcfour wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you cant just go and download a precompiled blob from a website and run it everywhere, like you can with macOS and Windows. Sure you can! It's called AppImage or Flatpak or Snap! I'm also not sure why compiling is treated as some taboo? It's not like Windows where it's actually impossible to set up a toolchain. Your distro comes with one installed! So that means you can run a single installer file, just like in Win…

they don't run without a runtime, and that runtime is backed by glibc, they just moved the issue one more layer. Virtually all software for the desktop is compiled once and then shipped to users and they never see the source. This works for Windows and macOS because their ABI allows it. For Linux you have to target each and every distro like a whole OS and keep up with it or your app won't run anymore after a few yea…

[dead]

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

#106

Post by WhyNotHugo »

pjmlp wrote: post #42
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…

Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,... I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it w…

It's not practical for game studios to target Linux natively, the best they can do is ensure their game works fine with Wine (plus, this gets them BSD support!).

I have several games from 10+ years ago from Humble Bundle. The Linux builds all have quirks (my gamepad won't work on any of them). The Windows builds work fine with Wine (the same gamepad works on all of them).

Plus, given the lack of a stable ABI, I can't really run the Linux builds natively either, because they dynamically link some library which doesn't match on my host. I need some special chroot or container (which Steam can manage). Requiring a container isn't any better than requiring Wine.

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

#107

Post by WhyNotHugo »

pjmlp wrote: post #66
arka2147483647 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. > Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. It is a huge hassle to make a new build to a new platform. You double build system, release management, and testing. Compared to just one plat. Games are complicated, and testing all the dynamic behaviour is also complicated. Making just a Win32 bu…

That reasoning fails flat given the same studios have no issues supporting iOS, PlayStation, Swift and XBox, which are completely alien to what is used on Android NDK, APIs that are GNU/Linux compatible for 3D rendering, audio and asset loading. Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios.

> Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios.

For a studio selling their games via Steam, there is no benefit in making a Linux build.

Their clients still need Steam to run it, and there's no practical different between Steam creating a container with a dedicate Linux userspace or with a dedicated Proton setup.

The audience that REALLY cares whether the game is Linux-native or not is likely the audience that wouldn't want to use Steam.

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

#108

Post by pjmlp »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #106
pjmlp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,... I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it w…

It's not practical for game studios to target Linux natively, the best they can do is ensure their game works fine with Wine (plus, this gets them BSD support!). I have several games from 10+ years ago from Humble Bundle. The Linux builds all have quirks (my gamepad won't work on any of them). The Windows builds work fine with Wine (the same gamepad works on all of them). Plus, given the lack of a stable ABI, I can't…

It certainly used to be in Loki days, what happened is that there is no money in the game.

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

#109

Post by pjmlp »

BirAdam wrote: post #102
pjmlp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proton represents Valve's failure to make Linux gaming attractive to game studios. Not even those that have Android/Linux NDK builds, bother with porting to GNU/Linux. Besides blaming Microsoft, look inside into the endless reboots of audio stack, GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE vs Sway vs whatever is cool in Linux Desktops this month, X Windows vs Wayland,... I was a believer, until 2010, then went back into Windows 7. If it w…

WINE was not the first Windows on *nix implementation. Sun had Wabi which was Win16 and was also released for AIX, HPUX, and Caldera Linux. While Linux may be a pain to release software for, had anyone been interested enough, a solution could have been found. No one cared because Windows was the market and everything else was a rounding error.

Yes, and?

Which game studios were targeting Solaris?

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

#110

Post by pjmlp »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #107
pjmlp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reasoning fails flat given the same studios have no issues supporting iOS, PlayStation, Swift and XBox, which are completely alien to what is used on Android NDK, APIs that are GNU/Linux compatible for 3D rendering, audio and asset loading. Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios.

> Valve basically failed to provide the business value for those studios. For a studio selling their games via Steam, there is no benefit in making a Linux build. Their clients still need Steam to run it, and there's no practical different between Steam creating a container with a dedicate Linux userspace or with a dedicated Proton setup. The audience that REALLY cares whether the game is Linux-native or not is likel…

Steam isn't the only store in town.

Actually, Valve could do an Apple and require native ports.

Using Proton to run Windows games is no different of using MAME, UAE,...

Post reply on HN