Comment by delta_p_delta_x
7 hours ago
As someone within that age group who moved back to Windows for development and entertainment, I find systems programming on Windows more fun and engaging than on competition OSs.
Oddly enough the open-source nature of the latter kind of takes away some of the thrill. Eerything is just... there, whereas with Windows there's always quite a bit of digging and investigation involved. Or maybe this is Stockholm syndrome; I dunno.
Funny feelings in my tummy reading this! I worked with winapi back in late 2000s to early 2010s and I remember having some great fun with it. Although there was MFC and WPF I didn't want to learn them because I wanted the fastest & leanest (catch the reference :) executable I could get; I'd then run gnu strip over the .exe too.
Stack Overflow was essential to figure out arcane flags that could solve my issues (when even MSDN, another great site with its examples, couldn't) and Raymond was very present in SO at that time, iirc he replied to one of my questions too. That's when I found his blog, always great reads!
Now I've been a 14-year Linux user and none of the toolkits and libraries give anything close to the winapi experience.
> fastest & leanest
Surely you mean leanest and meanest :P
I'd also say that tooling on Windows is simultaneously better and easier to use than on Linux; the noob case of green play button in an IDE is taken care of, but if you want detailed performance and memory profiling, record-replay debugging, hot-reload, all of this is straightforwardly available on Windows.