> Windows has gone to extreme lengths to not only maintain API compatibility, but ABI compatibility as well. Linux has a stable ABI as well. For a given archit

> Windows has gone to extreme lengths to not only maintain API compatibility, but ABI compatibility as well. Linux has a stable ABI as well. For a given architecture, like x86_64, syscall numbers and their arguments and their arguments/outputs are expected to be stable. The stable API/ABI promise of Linux is the syscalls, because at the end of the day that is the interface between userspace applications and the kernel, and kernel devs take not breaking userspace very seriously. And on Windows, the opposite is true. The stable interface is the Windows DLLs that you are supposed to use dynamically. If you hardcoded the syscalls, you cannot complain if your application breaks because windows only promises that the DLL will not break backwards compatibility, and they reserve the right to change the syscalls with any update. So you can have a Linux binary that works across many Linux versions without breaking. You can also have a Windows binary that works on one version of Windows but not the next.