A look at Dart

Posted Aug 18, 2020 9:28 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: A look at Dart by Wol
Parent article: A look at Dart

The problem Microsoft has is different to IBM's problem. WoW works just fine for allowing the OS to be updated without requiring legacy apps to be updated; however, people still write apps for the Win32 API, which is full of design decisions from Win16, which in turn has a certain amount of MS-DOS legacy, and of course DOS has CP/M legacy.

IBM has no direct equivalent - people did write code for CPF as well as for MVS, and they moved from MVS to PC-DOS and/or AIX. Microsoft can't get people to do the equivalent of moving MVS to CPF - when they attempt it, people come up with ways to use CPF stuff from MVS (stubs etc) so that you don't need to migrate.

Now, I'm not saying this is a bad problem to have, but it's a problem for Microsoft nonetheless; they cannot persuade developers onto APIs that replace the misdesigns in Win32, because developers don't move from the Win32 platform onto the new platform. Worse, they include escape hatches like P/Invoke, which developers latch onto and use for core functionality.

It's notable that Microsoft was only able to kill off Win16 entirely by refusing to support it on modern hardware (AMD64), despite it having been deprecated for 10 years by that point. And even then, they had to include a set of compat shims that replaced common Win16 code with Win32 equivalents. Had they not done that, there would be new Win16 code being shipped now, 25 years after Win32 was supposed to replace it.