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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

> Project Reunion is our vision for unifying and evolving the Windows developer platform to make it easier to build great apps that work across all the Windows 10 versions and devices* people use.*

I'm always a bit skeptical of projects that seek to harmonize or standardize APIs across different kinds of hardware devices, not for the benefit of users, but for the benefit of software developers.

The visions behind such projects often seem to produce elegantly designed software platforms, like Windows 10 Mobile[a] and Ubuntu Touch[b], for which there is actually no user demand.

Did end-users, i.e., regular people, ask for Project Reunion?

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_Mobile

[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch#Ubuntu_Mobile

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The Windows platform is extremely fragmented since Win10: not only there is different API and execution models (Win32, UPW) but also each new Win10 build brought new API that were not available on previous versions. Even as someone who program mainly in C# (on Mac/Linux) and some knowledge about the UWP disaster^W situation this is a mess cery hard to understand and not appealing to develop for.

why is it a problem that they release new api's? they couldn't bring them all out before they're written, so the alternative is to batch them up and release them all at once.

but then don't you still have a common install base, because the change will be too much for some users who will hold off, a la windows 7/8.

as someone doing a little windows dev on the side, the issue for me has been that i don't know whether uwp or win32 is the better (future proof) choice. i guess when one of the main distinctive features of your os is that it is backwards compatible, it is hard to change. (i noticed BN_UNPUSHED is documented as being included for compatibility with 16-bit versions of Windows before 3.0.)

I as a developer asked for it. Always tried to develop UWP but Microsoft has made it the hardest possible to. SDKs for UWPs are many and each of them is someway incompatible with their other revision. There used to be at least 3/4 competing different "versions" of "Universal" windows platform SDKs at the same time, each of them with different features and device support (including the latest which is like Windows 10 but only from certain major updates).

Sadly, even this just looks like XKCD #927 all over again.

It's honestly so ironic how little universal any of it is, in the end.

Honest question: Do you have a map of XKCD numbers to strips stored in your head? Or just this one? Or did you look it up?

Google "xkcd standards" and you'll get there. Most of the time the relevant XKCD comics can easily be linked to one or a few keywords.

I did Google the number (and sure enough I've seen that strip enough times that I could have memorized everything about it, including the number), I was just curious if that's what Hamcha did before posting. If so, it would have been easier to paste the link, unless everyone has it memorized but me. If not, great nerdy feat (in the good sense)!

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