5 ms·

IMO it's not phenomenal, it's the job of an operating system! Something seemingly lost to many new devs. I'm pretty convinced by now the reason the win32 API is

IMO it's not phenomenal, it's the job of an operating system! Something seemingly lost to many new devs. I'm pretty convinced by now the reason the win32 API is so stable because no developer is interested in "the old stuff", so nobody tinkers with it, hence stuff doesn't break. I'm fully with Linus Torvalds on this one, DON'T break userspace!!!

kristopolous 3y ago
It's actually work IIRC. Again, out of the game for 15 years but they used to be subsystems - these ABI compatibility layers Windows had one for DOS, Windows 16, "posix" and "os/2" with the last two in air quotes because it was only a subsection and they claimed mission accomplished - I think it was specifically to satisfy some government requirement but don't use me as a reference here. I don't think it could do os/2 "Presentation Manager" for instance. And there was a reason that cygwin was still a thing. I used it for an actual production project maybe 22 years ago. Wow, you've never seen slow until you run cygwin bash scripts on windows 2000. Regardless, it didn't come free - there's people up in Redmond who had that as part (or maybe all) of their job. I would have done that - maintain an esoteric part of Windows for a Microsoft salary? That's the kind of job where you have almost no boss. Sign me up. They had a bunch of weird projects like that. IE for Unix which ran on Solaris and HPUX (evolt has them: https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie you can probably QEMU that if you want). They also had Alpha, MIPS and I believe PPC versions of windows. There were a lot of other things that never got done. Like Windows for Intergraph Clipper, a fact that someone somewhere has decided to vouch for me on 12 years ago over yonder: https://www.cpushack.com/2011/01/16/cpu-of-the-week-intergraph-clipper-c4-mcm/ https://www.cpushack.com/2011/01/16/cpu-of-the-week-intergra... Again, all this shit I know? totally useless.
- rlkf 3y ago
  > I don't think it could do os/2 "Presentation Manager" for instance. There was a Presentation Manager subsystem for NT that could run 16-bit OS/2 graphical programs, but it was about as hard to come by as buying a single LTSC license is today.
  - stuaxo 3y ago
    Would love to see that demonstrated, maybe it will be on virtuallyfun.com one day.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    That's absurd. It's almost as silly as Quarterdeck's DESQview/X product that ran win-16 binaries. I ran it for laughs once in 2001, it worked. Motif, X, remote X, and 16 bit Windows --- it's everything you never wanted. http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html of course has a gallery. Quarterdeck - thanks for the memories, and also, the memories The lesson of DESQ is to design software to run on the computers of tomorrow and don't worry so much about the computers of today. That sounds stupid to me as well but neither of us have yachts or private jets so what do we know. It's about colonizing the future. I wouldn't be surprised if FreeDOS could spin this up.
    - stuaxo 3y ago
      Virtuallyfun has a go at running DesqView/X... and now I'm shocked to see it was all the way back in 2011 ! https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/27/desqviewx/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/27/desqviewx/ There's also a long running ticket in dosemu2 around some issues with DesqView/X https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2/issues/606 https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2/issues/606 In some more years it will probably be working fine there.
      - LeFantome 3y ago
        2011? Try 1992! DesqView/X was graphically multi-tasking DOS programs and running X applications the year after Linux was released. This was the Windows 3.1 era ( no cooperative multitasking ) and before OS/2 2.0 was out. Amazing. Like everything else at the time though, it could not run Windows applications ( Microsoft Office ) and so it was doomed.
asveikau 3y ago
There's kind of a tension between new Microsoft and old Microsoft. Old Microsoft put lots of thought into extensibility of APIs and makes it so that the old interfaces still work when they introduce new functionality. New Microsoft rewrites components from scratch and deprecates the old one every few years, and doesn't bother to shim over the old interface. The former group has it such that if your app was well written circa 1997-2001, it works well on the current release. The latter group has it so that you have several different copies of .NET on your hard drive and the "recommended" UI libraries for new applications has changed a lot, and the new hotness from a few years ago is deprecated.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > New Microsoft rewrites components from scratch and deprecates the old one every few years, and doesn't bother to shim over the old interface. This seems to be a trend across the industry, not just Microsoft. And it's a real shame. It makes it too risky to use a lot of shiny new things in real projects.
  - asveikau 3y ago
    I agree it's an industry wide thing. The Microsoft-specific variant of it is something I've seen up close. One of the issues always struck me as confusing interface and implementation. There isn't a good recognition of the fact that when you write against an API, you code against an abstraction, not a particular implementation. If your interface is good enough, you can do the rewrite treadmill thing to justify your current bonus or whatever, but you can point the old interface at a new implementation without most callers knowing the difference. So, I think a good example of this working relatively well would be Windows audio. The WinMM API still works. They rewrote the audio stack a couple of times, and introduced new APIs such as WASAPI and I forget the newer one. Winmm isn't broken. It may not have access to all the latest features, but it works. In contrast, all too often they discard an entire API because they want to rewrite the components underneath. But the I in API stands for interface. A good interface can survive rewrites of what's underneath.
    - 3y ago
rodgerd 3y ago
> Something seemingly lost to many new devs. I'm pretty convinced by now the reason the win32 API is so stable because no developer is interested in "the old stuff", so nobody tinkers with it, hence stuff doesn't break. I highly encourage you to take a look at the work Microsoft did with the XBox backwards compatibility for the XBox One X/S; unlike their naming teams, MS have people who care deeply about this stuff. Not only did they spend a lot of time making sure that most games work on the One X, they spent time doing things like having the newer platform upgrade the games on the fly where possible. MS absolutely has people tinkering with their old APIs, sometimes to quite good effect.

kristopolous 3y ago

It's actually work IIRC. Again, out of the game for 15 years but they used to be subsystems - these ABI compatibility layers Windows had one for DOS, Windows 16, "posix" and "os/2" with the last two in air quotes because it was only a subsection and they claimed mission accomplished - I think it was specifically to satisfy some government requirement but don't use me as a reference here. I don't think it could do os/2 "Presentation Manager" for instance. And there was a reason that cygwin was still a thing. I used it for an actual production project maybe 22 years ago. Wow, you've never seen slow until you run cygwin bash scripts on windows 2000. Regardless, it didn't come free - there's people up in Redmond who had that as part (or maybe all) of their job. I would have done that - maintain an esoteric part of Windows for a Microsoft salary? That's the kind of job where you have almost no boss. Sign me up. They had a bunch of weird projects like that. IE for Unix which ran on Solaris and HPUX (evolt has them: https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/ie you can probably QEMU that if you want). They also had Alpha, MIPS and I believe PPC versions of windows. There were a lot of other things that never got done. Like Windows for Intergraph Clipper, a fact that someone somewhere has decided to vouch for me on 12 years ago over yonder: https://www.cpushack.com/2011/01/16/cpu-of-the-week-intergraph-clipper-c4-mcm/ https://www.cpushack.com/2011/01/16/cpu-of-the-week-intergra... Again, all this shit I know? totally useless.

rlkf 3y ago
> I don't think it could do os/2 "Presentation Manager" for instance. There was a Presentation Manager subsystem for NT that could run 16-bit OS/2 graphical programs, but it was about as hard to come by as buying a single LTSC license is today.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  Would love to see that demonstrated, maybe it will be on virtuallyfun.com one day.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  That's absurd. It's almost as silly as Quarterdeck's DESQview/X product that ran win-16 binaries. I ran it for laughs once in 2001, it worked. Motif, X, remote X, and 16 bit Windows --- it's everything you never wanted. http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html http://toastytech.com/guis/dvx.html of course has a gallery. Quarterdeck - thanks for the memories, and also, the memories The lesson of DESQ is to design software to run on the computers of tomorrow and don't worry so much about the computers of today. That sounds stupid to me as well but neither of us have yachts or private jets so what do we know. It's about colonizing the future. I wouldn't be surprised if FreeDOS could spin this up.
  - stuaxo 3y ago
    Virtuallyfun has a go at running DesqView/X... and now I'm shocked to see it was all the way back in 2011 ! https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/27/desqviewx/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/27/desqviewx/ There's also a long running ticket in dosemu2 around some issues with DesqView/X https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2/issues/606 https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2/issues/606 In some more years it will probably be working fine there.
    - LeFantome 3y ago
      2011? Try 1992! DesqView/X was graphically multi-tasking DOS programs and running X applications the year after Linux was released. This was the Windows 3.1 era ( no cooperative multitasking ) and before OS/2 2.0 was out. Amazing. Like everything else at the time though, it could not run Windows applications ( Microsoft Office ) and so it was doomed.

asveikau 3y ago

There's kind of a tension between new Microsoft and old Microsoft. Old Microsoft put lots of thought into extensibility of APIs and makes it so that the old interfaces still work when they introduce new functionality. New Microsoft rewrites components from scratch and deprecates the old one every few years, and doesn't bother to shim over the old interface. The former group has it such that if your app was well written circa 1997-2001, it works well on the current release. The latter group has it so that you have several different copies of .NET on your hard drive and the "recommended" UI libraries for new applications has changed a lot, and the new hotness from a few years ago is deprecated.

JohnFen 3y ago
> New Microsoft rewrites components from scratch and deprecates the old one every few years, and doesn't bother to shim over the old interface. This seems to be a trend across the industry, not just Microsoft. And it's a real shame. It makes it too risky to use a lot of shiny new things in real projects.
- asveikau 3y ago
  I agree it's an industry wide thing. The Microsoft-specific variant of it is something I've seen up close. One of the issues always struck me as confusing interface and implementation. There isn't a good recognition of the fact that when you write against an API, you code against an abstraction, not a particular implementation. If your interface is good enough, you can do the rewrite treadmill thing to justify your current bonus or whatever, but you can point the old interface at a new implementation without most callers knowing the difference. So, I think a good example of this working relatively well would be Windows audio. The WinMM API still works. They rewrote the audio stack a couple of times, and introduced new APIs such as WASAPI and I forget the newer one. Winmm isn't broken. It may not have access to all the latest features, but it works. In contrast, all too often they discard an entire API because they want to rewrite the components underneath. But the I in API stands for interface. A good interface can survive rewrites of what's underneath.
  - 3y ago

rodgerd 3y ago

> Something seemingly lost to many new devs. I'm pretty convinced by now the reason the win32 API is so stable because no developer is interested in "the old stuff", so nobody tinkers with it, hence stuff doesn't break. I highly encourage you to take a look at the work Microsoft did with the XBox backwards compatibility for the XBox One X/S; unlike their naming teams, MS have people who care deeply about this stuff. Not only did they spend a lot of time making sure that most games work on the One X, they spent time doing things like having the newer platform upgrade the games on the fly where possible. MS absolutely has people tinkering with their old APIs, sometimes to quite good effect.