That’s like praising English as common language around the world but ignoring why that is the case.
Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
71–80 of 147 posts
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sarcasm is an extremely poor method of communication. Speak plainly and clearly. > Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development. Profiling and debugging tools are RADICALLY superior on Windows. RADICALLY. GDB/LLDB is garbage. For debugging Visual Studio (for adults, not VSCode), or on special occassion WinDbg, is great. Raddbg may be awesome some day and may also support Linux. That'll…
Hey, want to race to install toolchains? I'll install everything I need to build the Linux kernel and, say, typical SDL2 applications. I'll give you a 3 hour head start, all you have to do is install Visual Studio, WDK, and the Windows SDK, and hope they play nicely with each other! Good luck! Then we can switch places so you can install for the 5.3% (and growing) of your gaming userbase that doesn't use an OS with a…
I think you are coming at this with very different priorities. For most people, installing tool chains is a one time job, that they can grit their teeth through if it works well for them. No one wants to constantly install or reinstall and make sure the installation process is lightning fast.
It's the reason why Linux still hasn't taken off on desktop. People want good application support, not infinite customisations and blazing fast compile speeds. In fact, slow compile speeds might even give people an excuse to go chat with colleagues and take breaks. What you want is not what others want too
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#73Sometimes 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.
I don't think so. Oracle isn’t a consumer-facing company and doesn't really care about that sector. SWT and Swing will likely remain as ugly as they are for the next century, regardless of their popularity. Microsoft, Google, and Apple have invested millions to polish their GUI solutions because that’s where their revenue comes from.
JavaFX is surprisingly decent. Nobody cares bc the web ate everything.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sarcasm is an extremely poor method of communication. Speak plainly and clearly. > Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development. Profiling and debugging tools are RADICALLY superior on Windows. RADICALLY. GDB/LLDB is garbage. For debugging Visual Studio (for adults, not VSCode), or on special occassion WinDbg, is great. Raddbg may be awesome some day and may also support Linux. That'll…
Hey, want to race to install toolchains? I'll install everything I need to build the Linux kernel and, say, typical SDL2 applications. I'll give you a 3 hour head start, all you have to do is install Visual Studio, WDK, and the Windows SDK, and hope they play nicely with each other! Good luck! Then we can switch places so you can install for the 5.3% (and growing) of your gaming userbase that doesn't use an OS with a…
It's funny you mention that.
You know which platform is super duper mega easy to cross-compile to? And you know what platfrom is (almost) FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to compile against an arbitrarily old version of glibc? The answer (in order) is Windows and Linux.
But in anycase you still have it wrong. Compiling and running for your machine isn't the problem. The question is can you give me a binary that runs on my machine. And also I'm not going to tell you what the environment is. But I will yell at you if it doesn't work.
Anyhow. Portable toolchain install for MSVC + WinSDK took about 30 seconds to download. Very easy. Here you go: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mmozeiko/7f3162ec2988e81e...
I do agree it's annoying this isn't default behavior.
> you must be kidding.
Geez you are very frustrating to communicate with. I literally said "for special occasion". Good grief. Visual Studio debugger is kinda mediocre but still best-in-class and Linux doesn't even have an equivalent to compare against. WinDbg has some slick commands for super niche cases. Awful GUI with no discoverability though. (Just like Linux! bad dum tsh)
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
> 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."
Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware.
> With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was doomed.
Sun was a hardware company that did everything it could to commoditize software. That strategy works extremely well for hardware companies -- Intel successfully did the same thing for many years -- as long as their hardware is competitive.
They were perfectly content to sell SPARC hardware with Linux on it. But to do that they need to sell enough of it to keep up the R&D, i.e. they needed to ship desktop chips in similar quantities to Intel instead of only servers.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#76Earlier 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…
the other way around is kind of how libgdx games run on iOS :)
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " 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 b…
> 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." Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware. > With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was…
Original Sun hardware was rugged, operating mounted in truck beds running across corrugated roads rugged, optional full Faraday shielding for box, cables, and monitors tough. Really positive "never going to let you go" slotting of expansion cards into motherboard that resisted vibration issues. Fans that could go in a building HVAC.
That came at a cost and the market size of people that really really wanted / needed that field toughness was considerably smaller than the general office usage market.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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." Which is why Microsoft had to use such dirty tricks to prevent them from making inroads into workstations and desktops at the point that they still had competitive hardware. > With no way to compete with free as in beer software, Sun was…
Original Sun hardware was rugged , operating mounted in truck beds running across corrugated roads rugged, optional full Faraday shielding for box, cables, and monitors tough. Really positive "never going to let you go" slotting of expansion cards into motherboard that resisted vibration issues. Fans that could go in a building HVAC. That came at a cost and the market size of people that really really wanted / needed…
Because that's the market you can win when you're locked out of the mass market. But it's also not sustainable because then the mass market product will move up (Xeons based on x86) and you still can't move down with Microsoft blocking you.
Whereas if not for that, you could do both. Design a solid chip and then put dozens of them in a big iron cabinet for big money but also offer desktops with just one of them for prices that compete with Dell. Except that Dell's customers expect to open their existing Office documents and run their Windows API proprietary software and then won't buy from you.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#79Hasn'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.
I think it is NOT a gigantic success.
It's an OK success.
A gigantic success would mean there's no friction at all running Windows apps on other platforms.
Even with all that development work it is a LONG way from easy to run Windows apps on Linux.
Re: Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sarcasm is an extremely poor method of communication. Speak plainly and clearly. > Performance profiling and debugging tools are critical for game development. Profiling and debugging tools are RADICALLY superior on Windows. RADICALLY. GDB/LLDB is garbage. For debugging Visual Studio (for adults, not VSCode), or on special occassion WinDbg, is great. Raddbg may be awesome some day and may also support Linux. That'll…
Hey, want to race to install toolchains? I'll install everything I need to build the Linux kernel and, say, typical SDL2 applications. I'll give you a 3 hour head start, all you have to do is install Visual Studio, WDK, and the Windows SDK, and hope they play nicely with each other! Good luck! Then we can switch places so you can install for the 5.3% (and growing) of your gaming userbase that doesn't use an OS with a…
> Hey, want to race to install toolchains?
Not the parent commenter. It's really not that hard.
MSVC: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/?q=build+tools#...
Clang targeting MSVC ABI: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/download/llvmo...
Clang targeting MinGW ABI: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw/releases/tag/20260421
GCC targeting MinGW ABI, running in MSYS2: https://github.com/msys2/msys2-installer/releases/download/2...
Or, if you want a command-line, winget makes it easier still:
winget install -e --id Microsoft.VisualStudio.BuildTools LLVM.LLVM MartinStorsjo.LLVM-MinGW.UCRT BrechtSanders.WinLibs.MCF.UCRT