One runtime to rule them all

Joel on Software writes, "How Microsoft Lost the API War", which details how Microsoft has in .NET devalued the win32 API and how this is going to cost them big-time going forward. Nice article explaining that you have to throw away cruft eventually.

The big argument is based on whether breaking backwards compatability will lose them some of the developer base. Joel argues that it affects end users (i.e. breaking legacy applications on recent OSes), and I don't disagree, but do developers care? He does suggest that engineers like to get things right, so wouldn't a change in the APIs, even if it breaks them, be welcomed if it meant that they are now just right?

Perhaps where they have gone wrong is by revealing their roadmap - Avalon, WinFX, WinFS etc - too early, meaning developers won't come up to speed on current .NET APIs now, knowing that come Longhorn everything will change. The vaccuum created is a great opportunity for Mono to move people to the Free Software Stack (tangental reference) using this new fangled C# language, instead of waiting to see what the long term path from Microsoft is.

Another thing that struck me was the developer tool angle - Microsoft won't be giving away their development tools for free because that will kill off all the other tool vendors (i.e. Borland) and create the monopoly that they'd like, but will be used against them in further anti-trust cases. This is another wonderful thing about gcc, gdb, vim etc. They're free. You can fix them. And no-one can compete with them because of these strengths.

It's very interesting to see that an admittedly pro-Microsoft commentator thinks the move to managed runtimes is a good thing. I've always hated using C on a Windows box because of segmentation issues, buffer over-runs crashing the OS etc. Glad to see that the lessons learnt under Unix and under languages like Ada and Java are finally being brought to Windows under .Net. Perhaps that's why C# is no great step up for anyone who's developed under Unix. It's also why developing C under Unix has been an awful lot friendlier than developing anything under Windows.

Lots of interesting thoughts in this article.

| 16 Jun 2004 | #