[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

[Pete Ryland]

On 05/02/07, Chris Jones <cmsj at tenshu.net> wrote:
> At least part of the reason why the Windows APIs are such an insane
> tangle of different APIs to do the same thing is that throughout
> Windows' lifetime, stupid third party developers have done stupid things
> and MS has to keep adding workaround after workaround to keep their
> stupid apps running.

The whole "third-party apps look crap and don't upgrade well" thing is
an interesting thing to study carefully.  Which I did when I went from
Win3.1 to Win95.  I had an app which worked well under Win3.1 that
looked utter crap on Win95.  I used a debugger to inspect the API
calls that it was making.  I then used the same technique to inspect
the API calls that MS Word was using.  I found that MS Word didn't in
general use any of the documented API, whereas the third-party app had
used it throughout.  From one Windows version to the next, the
undocumented parts of the API seemed to produce stable results, but
the documented API calls changed behaviour in subtle but damaging
ways, making the third-party apps look and feel much worse.  In
summary, I think it's a conspiracy.

Pete
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