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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Zadji I love your work. Which build is this going to land in? Do you know if any of the third party console apps using the new API yet?

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It's already available in current insider's builds, and will be landing officially in the next available Windows release some time later this year.

We're still working with ConEmu, VsCode, and OpenSSH to get them all over to the new API, with varying levels of adoption in the next few months likely.

Currently, WSL is also using the same functionality, if you open a WSL distro and run any Windows executables (eg `cmd.exe`), they'll run attached to a conpty. I use this as my daily driver.

You might want to talk to the Cygwin people to get their pty layer to use the new virtual console.

Maybe the guys at alacritty are interested in this as well.

https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

They are: https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/28

That is an excellent suggestion, I'll get our PM to reach out :)

Out of curiosity, are you backporting onto Windows 10, or is Windows 10 the only release vehicle for everything in master? If the latter, how are you releasing piecemeal?

Pretty much any new features we release are only available on new Windows 10 releases. Unless there's a gigantic demand for a feature, or business impact, we're not really capable on our team of backporting anything.

What I meant is: are you building a Windows 11, or is Windows 10 the only release vehicle? I'm trying to imagine you pushing to a master branch to integrate into what becomes the insider builds, and then... either those become a future release of Windows 10, or you backport onto a Windows 10 branch. Neither option would be very appealing to me if it was up to me.

Windows 10 is the "last Windows ever". There's a pretty wide tree of branches under "winmain" that teams contribute to, and at each layer more branches are merged together, until they finally hit winmain, and then weekly they tag (more or less) a build from winmain as the Insider's build for the week.

It's actually a lot more elegant than you'd expect it to be for a project with as many developers as Windows has

Thanks. Got it. Having worked on Solaris, this sort of thing is very interesting to me.

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