Section 3.8. Wither Win32?

3.8. Wither Win32?

As with POSIX, the Win32 standard has not remained static over time. Microsoft has continued to develop and extend it, and has the advantage that anything it publishes immediately becomes the "standard," as is the case with all single vendor-defined standards.

However, Microsoft is attempting to deemphasize Win32 as it moves into its new .NET environment and the new world of "managed code." Managed code is code running under the control of an underlying virtual machine (called the Common Language Infrastructure, or CLI, in .NET) and can be made to prevent the direct memory access that is the normal mode of operation of an API designed for C coding, such as Win32 or POSIX. Free Software is also making a push into this area, with the Mono project, which implements the Microsoft C# language and .NET-managed code environment on Linux and other POSIX systems.

Even if Microsoft is as successful as it hopes to be in pushing ISV programmers to convert to .NET and managed code using its new C# language, the legacy of applications developed in C using the Win32 API will linger for decades to come. ISV programmers are an ornery lot, especially people who have mastered the Win32 API, due to its less-than-complete documentation.

What seems to happen over the years is that experienced Win32 programmers gain a sort of folk knowledge about the Win32 APIsi.e., how they really work versus what the documentation says. I often hang out on Usenet Windows discussion groups, and the attitudes of the experienced Windows programmers are very interesting: they usually hate telling novices how stuff works. It's almost as if having learning Windows is a badge of honor, and they don't want to make earning that too easy for the neophytes. They exude an air of "they must suffer as I did."

As Microsoft becomes less interested in Win32 with the release of its new Longhorn Windows client and the move to managed code, is it possible for Microsoft to lose control of it? The POSIX standard is so complete because it was designed to allow programmers reading the standards documents to re-create a POSIX system from scratch. The Win32 standard is nowhere near as well documented as that. However, there is hope in the Wine project, which is attempting to re-create a version of the Win32 API that is binary compatible with Windows on Intel x86 systems. Wine is, in effect, a second implementation of the Win32 system, making it closer to a true vendor-independent standard. Efforts taking place at companies such as CodeWeavers and Transgaming Technologies are very promising; I just finished playing the new Windows-only game Half-Life 2 on my desktop Linux system, using the Wine technology. This is a significant achievement for the Wine code and bodes well for the future.