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liquid_thymeHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and …

Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and then some on Linux. Targeting Windows is insanely easy, because of the ABI. You compile once and you have an extremely high chance that it just works on every Windows version. Not perfect, but better than any other platform ever made. Heck I've used software from CDROMS where the binary was compiled 20 years ago and it still works today without any modification. With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking or some other craziness, or open up your source code and let someone else take the headache. Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies. And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module. >The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. …

Original discussionWindows API Is Successful Cross-Platform API141 source comments · at import
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gregman1HN

(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.

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RandomGerm4nHN

You can also simply use Flatpak with the Freedesktop Runtime. It runs everywhere regardless of the distribution. For games Steam offers something similar with the Steam Runtimes. You simply develop for that one container and the software will still be running in 20 years. Even though, of course, making software proprietary isn’t best practice. If you make everything open source from the start the various Linux distributions and users can adapt it themselves for their distribution and eventually modernize it as well.

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MaPi_HN

>do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking But isn't this exactly what shipping on Windows looks like? I've just checked my Windows partition and there are 43 instances of sqlite dll and 16 instances of Qt5Core.dll because every program that uses those libs needs to include them in their "giant bundle of everything".

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rbanffyHN

> With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, This is what you do for Flatpack, Steam, or Docker. All these are popular options. > Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies. Most distros offer tooling to make packages for their package managers. With them you declare the dependencies you want and the package manager does the rest. > And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module. The right way to do it is to open source it and let the installer compile the software against the kernel headers. Sysdig and VirtualBox do that.

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WhyNotHugoHN

The Linux (and BSD) ecosystems are not geared for shipping binary-only software. Everything is designed for distributions to package software _from source_, so there's no stable ABI.

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pipesHN

I'm eternally confused by what an ABI actually is. Especially now that people say the win 32 api is the stable Linux ABI. Genuine question, what is the difference as they both seem to be conflated.

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