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> It seems like Win32 happened a bit by accident, a bit by overengineering and a bit by Microsoft's attempt to lock everyone to their 'special' development environments, which did not include C as a conscious choice by Microsoft.

Maybe I just haven't had my coffee yet, but I'm not understanding what this is supposed to mean.

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I don't understand this either. They've always offered C. In many ways Win32 and NT are as much a ""C operating system"" as UNIX. The only "special development environment" might be Visual Basic.

Maybe they meant Microsoft didn't really stick to the C standard library. _strdup vs strdup. malloc vs HeapAlloc. assert, fopen, etc. The functions mostly exist but really aren't the way to program Windows.

After the p-machine era, MS was all in on C. They had some technical reason for preferring the pascal calling convention, like saving a few bytes of program text.

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