Hacker News Reader

Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

> So while a regular PC will boot up and immediately run all of the services necessary to run a Win32 application, for example, Windows 10X won’t load this subsystem until it’s needed. This, the company argues, allows it to be very efficient with the resources available on the machine and extend its battery life significantly.

Hopefully they won't decide it is never needed.

View on HN

They have already tried this one. It didn't end well.

Exactly; they got that out of their system with Windows RT. (And apparently the upcoming Windows 10 for ARM will ship with Win32 support via emulation.)

Win32 is an OS API, which doesn't necessarily relate to the CPU or other chipset members. Do you mean it will Win10 for ARM will support code targetted at ia32/amd64 CPUs via emulation?

Windows 10 on ARM has been shipping for over a year, and it has an x86 (but not x86-64) emulator.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/

Oops, thanks— clearly I’ve not been following things too closely!

(I think I wrongly assumed it wasn’t out yet since I hadn’t heard of a new ARM-based Surface release.)

What’s the killer app for win32?

There is a lot of Win32 using code out there.

It may even be the case that MS's long-lived flagship products (Office, VS) are not completely free of it.

In the event you are not joking, there are entire industries running on Win32. My industry alone (EDA) is a 100B dollar industry. I'm aware of many others.

VBA macros in Excel is my standard answer.

Everything that makes Windows worth using.

Fwiw my question was not intended to be facetious and it may not be obvious what makes Windows worth using.

The installers for 64 bit applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com