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.
All true, but simultaneously, if you look at it not in the “how did we get here” but “what’s out there today” light, it’s an option that can run on a lot of platforms. Not by some particular merit but because history happened this way - but that’s not a problem with the technology itself.
The article defines "success" in the Windows context as being "available everywhere". It does not address how it got to that point.
And sure, you might not like Microsoft, and you may not like how it became successful (using the above definition) but the fact that it is available everywhere is not in dispute.
Of course most successful things have murky pasts. We don't necessarily agree with how it got there, but there it is. That is, at least in the technical sense irrelevant. You may prefer LP's or CD's, but streaming is now the successful way to get your music.
That doesn't mean it's the only way though, and of course you are free to not use Windows programs, or play games via Steam etc. That is your choice.
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.
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
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
Yes, which the article claims is just a theory now, irrelevant for the real world. More crucially though, http3 doesn't use TCP because it is built on top of UDP.
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?
Because hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations made it happen, not because Microsoft wanted it but in spite of it.
In this case the route to success was via marketing (isn't it always so?), via market share, via application dominance (attracting developers to develop for the platform), and via insane levels of backward's compatibility. It was successful not because of the code itself (end users don't care 2 figs about the elegance of the code) but because they optimized for the end user experience.
Linux optimized for the experienced, technically adept user, who wanted to fiddle, customize and could write programs. Apple optimized for the "now", ignoring the past and regularly made existing programs obsolete and unrunnable.
I wrote windows programs in 1995. They still run today. They have run on all versions of Windows since then, without even a recompile. Everything I have [1] just keeps running. And it turns out, that's something users really want.
I get that we're all technical folk here. I get that we strive for technical excellence and elegance. I get that we operate in the "now", ignoring hardware and software from the past. But the market is different, and wants different things. If you want a successful business you need to understand the market, not just your own aesthetics. Microsoft understands that, and that's why the market (especially the business market) relies on them.
[1] - Except games. Copy protection on some of my games means they don't run anymore - but to be fair those were hacks designed specifically to prevent the game running in the first place.
(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.
All true, but simultaneously, if you look at it not in the “how did we get here” but “what’s out there today” light, it’s an option that can run on a lot of platforms. Not by some particular merit but because history happened this way - but that’s not a problem with the technology itself.
I concur.
The article defines "success" in the Windows context as being "available everywhere". It does not address how it got to that point.
And sure, you might not like Microsoft, and you may not like how it became successful (using the above definition) but the fact that it is available everywhere is not in dispute.
Of course most successful things have murky pasts. We don't necessarily agree with how it got there, but there it is. That is, at least in the technical sense irrelevant. You may prefer LP's or CD's, but streaming is now the successful way to get your music.
That doesn't mean it's the only way though, and of course you are free to not use Windows programs, or play games via Steam etc. That is your choice.
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.
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
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.
http3 operates on a different OSI layer
Yes, which the article claims is just a theory now, irrelevant for the real world. More crucially though, http3 doesn't use TCP because it is built on top of UDP.
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?
>> How is that successful cross platform?
Because hundreds of developers, multiple open source projects and the backing of major corporations made it happen, not because Microsoft wanted it but in spite of it.
In this case the route to success was via marketing (isn't it always so?), via market share, via application dominance (attracting developers to develop for the platform), and via insane levels of backward's compatibility. It was successful not because of the code itself (end users don't care 2 figs about the elegance of the code) but because they optimized for the end user experience.
Linux optimized for the experienced, technically adept user, who wanted to fiddle, customize and could write programs. Apple optimized for the "now", ignoring the past and regularly made existing programs obsolete and unrunnable.
I wrote windows programs in 1995. They still run today. They have run on all versions of Windows since then, without even a recompile. Everything I have [1] just keeps running. And it turns out, that's something users really want.
I get that we're all technical folk here. I get that we strive for technical excellence and elegance. I get that we operate in the "now", ignoring hardware and software from the past. But the market is different, and wants different things. If you want a successful business you need to understand the market, not just your own aesthetics. Microsoft understands that, and that's why the market (especially the business market) relies on them.
[1] - Except games. Copy protection on some of my games means they don't run anymore - but to be fair those were hacks designed specifically to prevent the game running in the first place.
Cuz there's good software written against it. And it doesn't need to be recompiled.
Will I ever target it? No, I'd rather you rip my bones and eyes out. But it's unarguably successful.
kinda