5 ms·

I agree with you on that. The Facebook platform exceeded even Windows in the level of developer displeasure and brain damage from working with it.

bratsche 13y ago
Maybe Windows isn't that pleasant to work on, but not in any of the ways that he was describing. Windows has always had very stable APIs. The basic Win32 APIs have remained stable and constant for an insanely long period of time; there was plenty of churn in what was the recommended way to write an app (Win32 -> MFC -> .NET), but those are essentially higher levels and it seems that they've remained stable as well. It seems like Windows RT is the first time they've actually broken backwards binary compatibility isn't it?
- signalsignal 13y ago
  Windows RT didn't break any compatibility because Windows RT was built on the ARM hardware platform. Win32 was just a software platform on Intel's hardware platform and won't work on ARM's hardware.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - bratsche 13y ago
    I think I meant to write WinRT instead of Windows RT. My understanding is that Windows RT is the new ARM-based Windows OS, but WinRT is a new set of system calls which replace the old Win32 APIs. Am I mistaken in this?
    - signalsignal 13y ago
      Yes. The Windows-Intel platform is fully backwards compatible back to Windows 3.1 with 32-bit.
- btilly 13y ago
  It seems like Windows RT is the first time they've actually broken backwards binary compatibility isn't it? Very much not true. Early on, "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They pulled the same trick several times against competitors, for instance Microsoft Word took dominance with Windows 95 because there was a period of 9 months where WordPress was not available on the new OS while Microsoft Word was. This was one of the issues in Novell's 2004 lawsuit against Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior. The last I heard was an appeal filed late last year, see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121123221716522 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121123221716522 for details. I do not think that the appeal has been decided yet. There have been other, less nefarious, sources of breakage. For instance at one point Microsoft changed malloc() to try to assign recently deallocated memory if possible. The purpose is laudable - it is to push developers to notice and fix memory bugs. However, it naturally caused many programs that had been working to quickly crash. (Previously they would have run for much longer before crashing - long enough to be useful, but quickly enough to contribute to the perception that Microsoft software was buggy.) Therefore Microsoft made a list of important programs that it knew would crash, and for those programs only gave them the old behavior. Many small companies did not make the list, and the result is that their programs wouldn't run after that upgrade. Microsoft's behavior here was defensible (in fact I like it), but it was a deliberate incompatibility.
  - millstone 13y ago
    Oh, how delightful a slip. Run, the Internet is rotting your brain! btilly surely meant WordPerfect, not WordPress.
    - btilly 13y ago
      Oops, you are right.
  - jussij 13y ago
    > Many small companies did not make the list, and the result is that their programs wouldn't run after that upgrade. I've been developing a programmer’s editor for every version of Windows since 3.0 and can honestly say I never notice any of these issues with newer versions of Windows. I can safely say the crashes I witnessed where all of my own making.
return0 13y ago
You probably haven't worked with Windows development.

bratsche 13y ago

Maybe Windows isn't that pleasant to work on, but not in any of the ways that he was describing. Windows has always had very stable APIs. The basic Win32 APIs have remained stable and constant for an insanely long period of time; there was plenty of churn in what was the recommended way to write an app (Win32 -> MFC -> .NET), but those are essentially higher levels and it seems that they've remained stable as well. It seems like Windows RT is the first time they've actually broken backwards binary compatibility isn't it?

signalsignal 13y ago
Windows RT didn't break any compatibility because Windows RT was built on the ARM hardware platform. Win32 was just a software platform on Intel's hardware platform and won't work on ARM's hardware.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- bratsche 13y ago
  I think I meant to write WinRT instead of Windows RT. My understanding is that Windows RT is the new ARM-based Windows OS, but WinRT is a new set of system calls which replace the old Win32 APIs. Am I mistaken in this?
  - signalsignal 13y ago
    Yes. The Windows-Intel platform is fully backwards compatible back to Windows 3.1 with 32-bit.
btilly 13y ago
It seems like Windows RT is the first time they've actually broken backwards binary compatibility isn't it? Very much not true. Early on, "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They pulled the same trick several times against competitors, for instance Microsoft Word took dominance with Windows 95 because there was a period of 9 months where WordPress was not available on the new OS while Microsoft Word was. This was one of the issues in Novell's 2004 lawsuit against Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior. The last I heard was an appeal filed late last year, see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121123221716522 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121123221716522 for details. I do not think that the appeal has been decided yet. There have been other, less nefarious, sources of breakage. For instance at one point Microsoft changed malloc() to try to assign recently deallocated memory if possible. The purpose is laudable - it is to push developers to notice and fix memory bugs. However, it naturally caused many programs that had been working to quickly crash. (Previously they would have run for much longer before crashing - long enough to be useful, but quickly enough to contribute to the perception that Microsoft software was buggy.) Therefore Microsoft made a list of important programs that it knew would crash, and for those programs only gave them the old behavior. Many small companies did not make the list, and the result is that their programs wouldn't run after that upgrade. Microsoft's behavior here was defensible (in fact I like it), but it was a deliberate incompatibility.
- millstone 13y ago
  Oh, how delightful a slip. Run, the Internet is rotting your brain! btilly surely meant WordPerfect, not WordPress.
  - btilly 13y ago
    Oops, you are right.
- jussij 13y ago
  > Many small companies did not make the list, and the result is that their programs wouldn't run after that upgrade. I've been developing a programmer’s editor for every version of Windows since 3.0 and can honestly say I never notice any of these issues with newer versions of Windows. I can safely say the crashes I witnessed where all of my own making.

return0 13y ago

You probably haven't worked with Windows development.