Comment by Daishiman
2 months ago
Really amazing how Win32 is now another API that's been essentially virtualized out of Windows with performance improvements on top.
2 months ago
Really amazing how Win32 is now another API that's been essentially virtualized out of Windows with performance improvements on top.
It’s the stable ABI that Linux doesn’t want to have so it got shoved down its throat in userspace, with surprisingly good results and a typical 20 years in the making overnight success.
I'm convinced that the lack of a stable ABI and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer (requiring drivers to be in the kernel source tree) is what's preventing The Year of the Linux Desktop from ever arriving. I understand the principles behind both decisions, but at some point I think pragmatism should win out. I guess I'm just a bit surprised that no distro has taken up the mantle of providing these things; it seems to me it should be possible to build a stable ABI and HAL on top of the existing Linux kernel.
The problem is that as soon as you do that you're stuck with whatever architecture you already have, which incurs precisely the performance and maintenance burdens that Windows already suffers.
Which is a reasonable design choice for many things. But Linux can move fast in part because it can decide to discard bad ABI and HAL conventions.
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> I guess I'm just a bit surprised that no distro has taken up the mantle of providing these things; it seems to me it should be possible to build a stable ABI and HAL on top of the existing Linux kernel
Doesn't that distro already exist and it is called WINE?
As funny as it is to pattern the stable ABI and HAL so directly after Win32, it's also a hardened, well battle tested one. Rather than needing to design something from whole cloth and then get user and driver code buy in for it, why not just use an ABI and HAL with a lot of existing code? WINE is a funny answer, but it is a respectable one. (I appreciate the "overnight success 20 years in the making" joke above, too, about it.)
That's pretty much what RHEL and Ubuntu LTS are. Stable for 10 years.
It is an API frozen in Windows XP days, most new additions are based on COM since Vista.
This will work out as long as Microsoft is willing to tolerate it, like netbooks.