Comment by userbinator
1 day ago
Relatedly, 30 years ago someone attempted to turn the Windows 3.1 API into an ISO standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Programming_Interf...
It didn't become one, but it did become standardised as ECMA-234:
https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
Well, Wine shows that Win32 is the only stable ABI, even on Linux.
>On May 5, 1993, Sun Microsystems announced Windows Application Binary Interface (WABI), a product to run Windows software on Unix, and the Public Windows Interface (PWI) initiative, an effort to standardize a subset of the popular 16-bit Windows APIs.
>In February 1994, the PWI Specification Committee sent a draft specification to X/Open—who rejected it in March, after being threatened by Microsoft's assertion of intellectual property rights (IPR) over the Windows APIs
Looks like that's what it was.