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Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

Knowing Carmack, and the market, not much would change about this.

Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons. Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton; but still a smaller market than Windows. And macOS is even more of the third-option today given their antagonistic support to OpenGL/Vulkan and non-Apple-first developers (in general).

If anything, Linux would probably be switched to first since Carmack was always a hardline supporter and it seems to have the most capture velocity; but that’s still quite unlikely. And obviously all the other platforms would be missing from the list altogether given the triopoly/triculture that the modern desktop OS sphere has evolved into.

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> Windows still rules the roost, though it wouldn’t be referred to as Win32 today for various reasons.

Win32 is stable, supported and will stay supported forever, as various technologies built on top of it come and go. It is the API for the OS.

> Linux is even more important today, given the Steam Deck and Proton

Which uses Win32 under the hood!

There is a running joke that Win32 is the Linux's most stable API.

Win32 will be preserved forever in a glass museum case with life support bolted on -- just like how in Valve’s Source Engine, the Quake physics component (Qphysics) is treated as a ancient artifact to be called upon when its power needs to be channeled, but kept isolated from the "normal" VPhysics lest its Eldritch power corrupt the rest of the codebase.

Though judging from how CS2 is going, it seems that the quarantine measures aren’t particularly airtight.

> Win32 will be preserved forever in a glass museum case with life support bolted on

And that's a good thing because for game development you don't need much more from the OS, just enough to get a window, input events, audio and networking. All the interesting stuff all happens in the 3D APIs, and those have changed a lot since the early 2000s.

What you’re referring to as “Win32” is WinAPI and its derivative/wrapper technologies. Which can include WinRT, WinUI3, MFC, etc.

And “Win32” as a reference to the platform is well gone, as it’s exclusively “Win64” on the x86 side these days.

Thus why I said it would be unlikely he would refer to it as “Win32” specifically today. But yes, if you conflate “Win32” to “native Windows API” (even that term will be controversial, so replace “native” with “legacy” at your preference), it’s all the same today as then.

Nah, in the gamedev world Win32 has a pretty focused meaning: the subset of Windows system DLLs that are needed for game development, and that subset is pretty small, just enough to get an empty window, DXGI swapchain, D3D device, audio output, input and maybe networking, e.g. kernel32, user32, ole32, gdi32, dxgi, d3d11/d3d12 is pretty much all you need.

Except for the 3D API, the requirements for game development on the OS haven't changed much since around WinXP, and the fact that Win32 hasn't changed much since WinXP is still the greatest quality of Windows (since anything that came after the classic Win32 APIs was pretty much a shitshow - with the notable exception of DirectX).

Win32 as pure C API has stagnated in Windows XP view of the world.

Since Windows Vista, most new APIs have been introduced as COM libraries, exception being DDK and extending versions of existing ones with new nummeric or Ex suffixes.

Besides COM, other ones have been based on WinRT, which is COM upgraded to use .NET metadata instead of type libraries, and an additional base interface for reflection, IInspectable.

> There is a running joke that Win32 is the Linux's most stable API.

It's genuinely true. With the exception of the Linux ABI, everything else is in constant flux. I think systemd has slowly taken over the world to the point that it's not going anywhere but beyond that it gets really thin.

>Win32 is stable, supported and will stay supported forever, as various technologies built on top of it come and go.

I wouldn't assume that. The journey towards the web as an application delivery platform is making Win32 less relevant as time goes on.

> Windows still rules the roost

Windows is a legacy OS that isn't developed anymore and only exists to support the Excel cash cow.

Why not count Android as Linux?

It’s the biggest Vulkan target, by far.

Is John Carmack the Ja Rule of programming?

Because the only Linux thing Android exposes to userspace is the Linux kernel.

Everything else is either Java/Kotlin based or the set of official NDK APIs.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

It is hit and miss if using unstable APIs works across devices.

The Linux kernel is the only Linux thing. There is nothing else Linux to expose.

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