Things that I love about Windows programming: - IO Completion Ports (IOCP): https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-gil-and-exploited-all-c

Things that I love about Windows programming: - IO Completion Ports (IOCP): https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-gil-and-exploited-all-cores https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-... (to quote slide 40: "What works well on UNIX isn't performant on Windows[;] What works well on Windows isn't possible on UNIX"). - native support for fibers (CreateFiber etc.) - binary compatibility for GUI applications over decades (try to get to run an application that was linked against GTK+ 1.x under a current GNU/Linux system) - I personally prefer the Visual Studio debugger by far over gdb (but YMMV) - there is exactly one way to write GUI applications against (WinAPI) - all other libraries as MFC, WTL are just wrappers for it. Try writing an X11 app against XLib or xcb and you will find out why Windows is better in this point. - the same holds for other GUI functionality as clipboard and drag & drop (OK, admitted, it is a PITA under Windows, but far worse under GNU/Linux/X11) - When developing GUI applications under Windows vs. say Gtk+ oder Qt under Linux: If there is some functionality, which is very low level (say, support for multiple mice): Under Windows for this there is Raw Input and under X11 there is XInput2. While the Raw Input feels integrated quite well into the style of the whole WinAPI, using XInput2 when developing using Qt oder GTK+ feels really foreign and I always fear that I will break something. In other words: When developing for Windows the APIs often look much more homogenous than under GNU/Linux where I personally feel that there are different libraries with different styles (but you might feel differently) - I find the MSDN documentation much more helpful than man pages, but this might be my personal preference, at least I feel that when under Windows something is documented it is nearly always documented really well, while the quality of documentation varies a lot under GNU/Linux and is (for things that change more often) often outdated - Also I consider it as a bad idea that many Linux devs consider code as documentation if by default most "user-centered" GNU/Linux distributions will not install by default the source code to any installed package. - I personally prefer the slightly "overengineered" style of the Windows API instead of having to hack something (sometimes ugly) together if the API will not provide what I need; but this is again a matter of preference.