Just think of all the Steam games that are only available on Windows!
Some were, plenty were not, and C is nothing special as a turning point in that.
> If you have to call on specific features of a particular OS when writing business application code, that's a problem with the OS.
No, insofar as it's a problem, it's a problem with the application language or libraries, in that they don't abstract sufficiently the deployment platform.
Now, if they are bundled with the OS, it may be the same product as the OS, but it's not really an OS. problem.
Which ones were not?
Ah, ok. I meant general purpose languages, not languages specialized to particular applications. I should have made that clear.
I am sure you mean "designed for Win32 API."
They mean that those apps are currently deeply integrated with NT and switching is very expensive for the developers. See most games as an example.
[see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11865760 for a lively discussion on this topic]
* IOCP is loads better than epoll
* SEH is a better model for synchronous processor instructions than Unix signals
* Windows allows some better/easier ways to introspect or modify other processes than Linux does. You can't change another processes memory map on Linux, whereas you can on Windows. And /proc is a pretty poor interface for getting process data, IMHO.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...
You instantly lost all credibility by saying such an obvious Linux fanboy statement, ignoring reality and business constraints.
The value of the NT kernel is absolutely enormous, probably on the order of a trillion dollars.
Remind me: Which year was the year of the Linux desktop?
No, the value of the Windows installed base is enormous. But that does not mean the NT kernel is the reason for that value. People, and more importantly large corporations that are the primary customers for Windows, don't buy it because it has a technically superior kernel. They buy it because MS has had lock-in on the PC OS market for several decades now, due not to technical superiority but to IBM making two bonehead decisions that handed that market to MS, and MS has used its market position to force PC manufacturers into bundling agreements that increase the cost of using any other OS to the point where corporations can't justify doing it.
In other words, the value of the Windows installed base is that, because of historical events that I would much rather had gone another way but that's water under the bridge now, to a first approximation, Windows is the interface that everybody knows how to use to use a PC. The point of my comment was that it would be an improvement to put that known interface that has huge market lock-in on top of an OS kernel that didn't have all the known security and other technical flaws of Windows.
Of course linux (the kernel) also has a pretty huge phone marketshare, with android which uses the Linux Kernel.