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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how a project like Spectacle, which is OSX specific, relates. If someone wants to make an OS specific project, more power to them. The issue arises on platforms that span OSes, and they just never quite span onto Windows correctly.

Microsoft is very happy that Node, Java, Clojure, etc work on Windows. It helps them a lot. But they make little to no effort to help bridge the gap, they usually leave that to everyone else. That's my gripe, right there.

And to be fair, this is not a black and white situation. It's complex and Microsoft's role in all of this is complex too. And sometimes this issue does crop up on other OSes, for example Docker on OSX is sometimes a little painful.

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"But they make little to no effort to help bridge the gap, they usually leave that to everyone else."

OK, but that's also where you're wrong, right there. In general, but also particularly for this exact issue - Microsoft considered attempting to fix the file path limit for the first release of Windows 10. Maybe you don't understand, but it's going to take a herculean effort to fix this. They want to do it and if you need proof of that I can find posts of them talking about what I just said.

Don't UNC paths solve this problem already (30000+ char limit)?

The problem is the default/legacy APIs don't use the new paths... in .Net I had this problem a lot, and serious issues every method I tried to work around it would hard crash VS, let alone the application I was working on... in the end, after days trying the solution was to say f*ck it and just put the directory I was working with closer to the root of the drive in question.

Why they can't fix .Net under the covers to use UNC in windows to avoid the class of problem I don't know, understand or comprehend... and that's just one very common platform for windows. I would say the same for npm/node and libuv for that matter.

I use bash a lot in windows (installed with msysgit), and that's got it's own set of problems. More problematic is the number of node modules that rely on bash scripts for builds, that don't work at all in windows.... which makes it very hard to contribute.

I believe Microsoft worked to get Node.js supported on Windows.

Not just that, but they're working on making Node work with Chakra.

Can they make it so I can spawn a process and not worry about whether I'm spawning on unix or Windows?

I don't know it at that level of detail.

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