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Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

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101–110 of 187 posts

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has universal apps? When will they get 'it'?

Chrome, and thereby all Google webapps, run on every major OS.

What about their tablet and phone OS - Android? Is there an app-store for those 'webapps' (not the Chrome app store)?

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#102
Looking at twitter it seems like XAML is getting a ton of love from MS. Go back 2 years and many were predicting that HTML was going to win the war on Windows; what gives/what's changed?

Disclosure: written more XAML than I'd care too.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#103
post #70

One thing I don't see mentioned, do universal apps support C++11? I can understand why it's not as easy to support native code across platforms (i.e. need to do some kind of fat binary thing), but think it's a little sad to see all the work done to support modern C++ app development kind of abandoned. Really annoying if you have to choose between an app being universal or written in modern C++.

Microsoft is one of the biggest supporters of C++11, and C++14 for that matter. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh567368.aspx

Well, they're certainly catching up, but they have a bit to go to before they match clang or gcc: http://cpprocks.com/c1114-compiler-and-library-shootout/

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#105
post #42

Beware Apple, Google: Microsoft is starting to get it .

What about the internals? Is it still kind of a mess under the hood?

I heard they rebuilt the TCP/IP stack so it's not user land 32 bit driver anymore.

Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend.

What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked if it corrupts?

What about sunsetting Win32? Or improving the driver model?

They're starting to get it on the UI side, but the reason why I use Mavericks as my personal machine and work on a LAMP stack has less to do with how useful or pretty the start menu is, and more to do with the godawful internals of Windows. Or have we just resigned ourselves to a crappy OS internally that we've all just gotten used to?

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#106
post #58

The amazing thing is that you can potentially write all your code in C# and have backend/frontend logic for the web (ASP.NET), Windows, Windows Phone, and even iOS/Android (via Xamarin). Wow.

The amazing thing is that you can potentially write all your code in C and have backend/frontend logic for the web, Windows, Windows Phone, OSX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64, VAX, Arduino, Linux Kernel, Windows Kernel, Mach, Hurd, and practically every processor or operating system ever built, and even iOS/Android (via Xamarin). Wow. You can even link to and reuse that code from languages such as: C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Per…

> he amazing thing is that you can potentially write all your code in C and have backend/frontend logic for the web, Windows, Windows Phone, OSX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64, VAX, Arduino, Linux Kernel, Windows Kernel, Mach, Hurd, and practically every processor or operating system ever built, and even iOS/Android (via Xamarin). Wow.

Have you ever done C development like this, ever in your life?

I did. Between 1994 and 2003, we had applications run across Windows, HP-UX, Aix, DG/UX, GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris.

An awful mess of #ifdefs, compiler specific behaviours, lack of POSIX compliance, OS specific extensions.

This on the server side, and lets not forget there are ZERO portable standards for writing portable GUI code in C.

Finally, C shouldn't never had become mainstream given its lack of safety, that we are still suffering in 2014. There were better systems programming languages in the late 70's, they just weren't at Bell Labs.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#107
post #70

One thing I don't see mentioned, do universal apps support C++11? I can understand why it's not as easy to support native code across platforms (i.e. need to do some kind of fat binary thing), but think it's a little sad to see all the work done to support modern C++ app development kind of abandoned. Really annoying if you have to choose between an app being universal or written in modern C++.

> (i.e. need to do some kind of fat binary thing)

Fat binaries aren't needed to support pointer arithmetic or any other C++11 features in a cross-platform binary. LLVM bitcode supports pointer arithmetic. I also believe .NET bytecode supports pointer arithmetic. I'm not sure what other features you thought would require some kind of fat binary.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#109
post #102

Looking at twitter it seems like XAML is getting a ton of love from MS. Go back 2 years and many were predicting that HTML was going to win the war on Windows; what gives/what's changed? Disclosure: written more XAML than I'd care too.

From my understanding and use of XAML and HTML/JS, the UI performance you get on XAML apps is still better than whats achievable on HTML/JS apps.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "OS Language" of Linux and OSX is C. Not quite. Significant parts of XNU (the Mac OS X kernel) are written in C++.

And significant parts are written in Assembly as well. But Assembly isn't the "OS Language" of either Linux nor OSX :-p What I mean by OS Language, is the language that interacts with core OS Libraries. The OS Language of Android is Java. iOS is ObjC. OSX core is either ObjC or C. Linux is definitely C based. (ioctl) Microsoft is either C++ or C#. (DirectX, Ribbons, etc. etc. are behind COM interfaces that are most e…

If nothing else, OS X's I/O Kit API is C++ish (it's 'Embedded C++').
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