I agree that it's probably a bad idea. However, coming from Windows, you don't really think twice about it. MSFT has a long history of continuing to support all

I agree that it's probably a bad idea. However, coming from Windows, you don't really think twice about it. MSFT has a long history of continuing to support all APIs, no matter how you get to them, and not really caring what you do with them. Heck, I remember arguments on the .NET framework team when 1.1 was shipping about how to handle third-party applications that had used Reflection to access private members of class instances and whether the data could be changed. In several cases, it was going to break a few widely-used or mission-critical apps. I personally didn't even think twice and just went ahead and used private APIs, especially since they were literally direct copies of entry points available on OS X, just missing headers & an import lib.