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Comment by sjmulder | Hacker News Reader

That’s cool! Windows’ backwards compatibility is amazing. It also allows for feature detection so a program can work on 3.11 but also look and feel native on 10.

I played around with that here: https://github.com/sjmulder/netwake

It’s a simple utility but it works on Windows 3.11 (with Win32s) and up, but supporting high DPI, font scaling, and theming on Windows versions that support it.

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That's really cool, and yes, Windows' BC is really something. The engineering effort to keep everything working so well across versions must be staggering.

It must be powered by an enormous library of automated tests.

Favorited on GitHub for future reference (manually when needing to make a point). Awesome work!

I publish a universal msvcrt.lib that lets you use “standard C functions” without dependencies or static linking, but I’m quite sure it wouldn’t support Windows 3.x!

https://github.com/neosmart/msvcrt.lib

> Note: It is recommended to use the versioned C runtime when and where possible; this script is only provided for the convenience of developers familiar with the pitfalls and caveats that come with using the unversioned copy of msvcrt.dll and the minimal APIs it exposes!

I'm worried that people won't heed this warning.

Thanks! Note that I don’t have much experience writing Win32 apps so the code might not be top quality.

The universal lib is interesting for future work (the compiler inlined the few things I needed). For Win32s support generating a position-independent executable was the only problematic bit, but that's not an issue for libraries.

Oh, this is great! Wish I'd seen this when I was compiling Chocolate Doom (on old Windows 95 builds my DOOM.EXE requires msvcrt.dll).

Thanks. I needed it enough times to warrant making it easily accessible for everyone. Great work yourself!

I’m amazed they didn’t add a single game screenshot to the github page. You have to invoke the nastalgia

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