Windows API Is Successful Cross-Platform API

YPPH

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 operating systems is really just a bonus.

gregman1

(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-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach. No CS curriculum holds up Win32 as exemplary API design. No system copied it. A successful API earns adoption. Win32 enforced it.

wewewedxfgdf

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?

tehologist

Considering you can use 500 kilobyte distro of tcc that can self compile to build win32 apps and those versions will very easily run on wine. I think it is a valid point and a strategy I have used for sometime. Since windows can't decide what you should use for developing Windows apps

tehologist

As an added bonus, since win32 is so old. AI is quite strong at generating code for it, I have even had success with qwen 3.5 1.5B parameters with win32 and opengl 1.1

stkdump

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

dbacar

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.

qakajjqj

It's not that the train wasn't successful.