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There's nothing fancy about interfaces like IShellFolder. From a C perspective, they're just tables of function pointers. I don't know why they would require a

There's nothing fancy about interfaces like IShellFolder. From a C perspective, they're just tables of function pointers. I don't know why they would require a Microsoft compiler. But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid complaint. There are commercial compilers from Intel and others which I think are both thoroughly compatible with Windows and support some or all of C99; these are always options. I wasn't taking issue with any of your other examples, because I'm largely sympathetic to those claims. But Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint entirely.

beagle3 14y ago
> But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid complaint. There definitely was stuff incompatible. I think at some point gcc/icc started supporting these extensions, but for a long time, all of the midl / type library tools with MS only, and the header files used proprietary MS extensions. You could, of course, rewrite the definitions for another compiler (COM was documented), but it was a tedious error prone thing to do. > Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint entirely. The list of complaints was far from complete, I tried to give complaints of different kind. This one is in the same category of the IE6 stagnation (market owned -> innovation stops, standards ignored). It's not as antisocial as the rest of the complaints, but it is definitely in the "Microsoft isn't a friend of the community" department.