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> I really wish Microsoft would ship the IANA database with Windows, and the IANA-Windows mapping table too, and provide APIs to query them, and keep them updated with Windows update.

I think they have done exactly what you describe for several years at least:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.timezone...

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That’s a .Net API, so not easily usable from native code. If they offered a C API instead, almost anything could feasibly use it.

Plus, from reading that doc, it sounds like it only works on Windows if you enable “App-Local ICU” mode, in which case the ICU DLL is added to your .Net app’s distributable package - which implies the info isn’t actually bundled with Windows itself

Consider Python’s zoneinfo standard library module-it provides access to IANA TZ database. On all platforms except Windows it uses the copy of the DB bundled with the OS and updated by the OS update mechanisms. On Windows, you have to install a PyPI module containing it. If Microsoft bundled it with the OS, with a C (not .Net) API, you wouldn’t have to do that-but Microsoft doesn’t, so you do

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