4 ms·

Windows 8 may still be Windows, but WinRT is very much the System 9 -> OS X transition. Windows 8 supports both the old Win32 APIs and the new WinRT APIs.

• tracker1 13y ago
  That was going to be my comment as well... The WinRT kernel was started "fresh" to be mostly compatible, without the weird crufty legacy support. I think the biggest things holding back RT is that it's only on locked down ARM platforms, and low-level SDKs aren't widely available. I would speculate that RT will become the main windows kernel by Windows 10. Then again, I'm less likely to even be running Windows by then (4-6 years).
  • bskap 13y ago
    WinRT isn't a kernel, it's a shell. It's like saying that Android is going to replace Linux.
  • timthorn 13y ago
    You might (understandably) be conflating WinRT and Windows RT. One is ARM only, the other is not.
• mratzloff 13y ago
  Well, OS X had Classic[1] for years, so it had that compatibility layer to bridge 9 to X. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Environment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Environment
  • mrpippy 13y ago
    Right. In addition, CarbonLib ran on OS 8/9, so developers could migrate their apps to Carbon but continue to build OS 9 and X apps from the same codebase.
• guelo 13y ago
  I think of WinRT as more of a weird System 9 -> iOS transition.