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Comment by nynx | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft needs to go and redo the windows api at some point. Part of the reason why windows is such a terrible experience for developers is that it's so different from the posix-like apis available in macos and linux.

Maybe they should go all the way and make windows a layer on top of Linux.

I'd actually love if more OSes standardized around capability-based apis, like fuchsia.

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This will probably never happen. The killer feature of Windows is backwards compatibility. It can run apps that are 30 years old. A less than stellar developer experience isn't as big of a concern for Microsoft.

We have seen them attempt to ease some of the pain with COM and .NET, but under the hood the old APIs always live - many remaining bug compatible to keep existing apps working.

If Microsoft didn't care about developer experience, they wouldn't be working on WSL. And as someone who interned at msft several times, I can say for certain they cared about developers.

I didn't say they don't care about developers, I said it's not as big of a concern as end users, which I think is fair.

Also as a user of WSL, it's great, but I think it's goal was to keep people on their platform, which I think has worked out pretty well.

Everything Microsoft is doing for developers at the moment (WSL, Terminal, VSCode, etc) is there because they need developers onboard to sell Azure services. That these things might be useful outside of Azure is a happy coincidence.

The Windows Terminal is just awful! Slow! Bad UI, feels like a touch-based UWP app. Has absolutely no concept of Windowing, everything just feels awful because they follow the UWP design guidelines!

And extremely buggy as well!

WSL is for bringing into Windows, the developers that buy macOS laptops instead of supporting GNU/Linux OEMs, as they only care about a POSIX shell.

Windows NT api is the better one. Simple examples: all io is async, kernel memory is paged.

This is true but it's also a tremendously annoying api to use.

I think there would be a future for a better system interface that has all upsides of the win32 api, and none of the downsides.

It is not annoying to use, no. Even if you descend to the ntapi level.

That is what UWP was all about, due to the way it was mismanaged the whole Windows dev community said "No way!", and Project Reunion was born.

Plus we don't need the POSIXfication of Windows, WSL is there for those dev that buy Apple laptops instead of supporting GNU/Linux OEMs, so that they buy Windows laptops instead.

How does a posix api have anything to do with how a user experience works. At all.

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