alt Hacker NewsWindows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
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There's something deeply satisfying about compiling a Win32 desktop application and knowing that single binary will run unmodified on essentially every Windows machine from XP onward, and look nearly identical doing it. High-DPI is the one real caveat, but even that's manageable with a manifest. I'm not sure any other platform-native API comes close to that combination of reach and consistency. Running them on other operating systems is really just a bonus.
The true success of WinAPI, including originally with Windows, is that it provided stable ABI from version to version, and didn't lock you into any language.
The Unix world was lazy about it because of the approach of recompiling across somewhat source compatible systems thanks to POSIX, so there was reasonably fast portability if you didn't go too far off the beaten path.
But doing anything other than C (w/ Cfront maybe) and Fortran and Pascal was a problem, even without binary compat. Even from version to version (legacy of which we now have in glibc breaking binary compat all the time).
Microsoft went hard on the idea that if you bought/build a program for Windows version X, it would run on version X+1. You didn't have to buy a special upgraded version. You could update easier.
The same approach later drove introduction of things like PC System Design Guide and ACPI so you could just upgrade your computers instead of waiting for special OS upgrade just to boot (like it was common in other platforms, including Mac, VMS, and Unix workstation world).
Design wise, GUI parts of WinAPI aren't all that different from working with X intrinsics etc libraries (i.e. the parts above raw xlib)
The win32 api is extremely well documented, still supported and very stable. With tons of working examples to do pretty much everything with.
Hasn't it taken gargantuan multi decade efforts of hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations to make it work at all, let alone well, on Linux?
How is that successful cross platform?
As an added bonus, since win32 is so old. AI is quite strong at generating code for it, I have even had success with qwen 3.5 1.5B parameters with win32 and opengl 1.1
I think not only win32 but win32 + directx API, the most used API for gaming industry. Wine , Proton , Crossover, DXVK, VKD3D, D3DMetal , WineD3D, Apple game porting toolkit , SteamOS , Winlator/Gamehub etc android Wine variant , ReactOS , MinGW from that API
Considering you can use 500 kilobyte distro of tcc that can self compile to build win32 apps and those versions will very easily run on wine. I think it is a valid point and a strategy I have used for sometime. Since windows can't decide what you should use for developing Windows apps
> In the real world, the internet is TCP/IP
I guess he missed http3, which now makes up 35% of web traffic.
Sometimes I think that, if Java ditched the idea of JVM and followed what modern languages did today (write once, compile on every major platform), things would be different.
That’s like praising English as common language around the world but ignoring why that is the case.
It's been a joke for years that "Win32 is the most stable API on Linux".
It's not that the train wasn't successful.
kinda
(2024)
Interesting provocative article, I bet it will be praised on some Microsoft sponsored conference.
Wine and Proton are not tributes to Win32's portability. They are symptoms of a desktop market that Microsoft locked hard enough that the rest of us had to reverse engineer our way out. Market damage, not collaboration.
The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach.
No CS curriculum holds up Win32 as exemplary API design. No system copied it. A successful API earns adoption. Win32 enforced it.