Third-party compilers locked out of Windows Runtime development | Hacker News Reader

Third-party compilers locked out of Windows Runtime development

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37 pointsmariuz26 comments

I think the EU might get the nightstick out again if they pull this. A lot of vendors are piggybacking on MS and this will mean anti-competitive behavior.

Also, WinRT is a pretty big land grab by Microsoft and it's pissed a large number of developers off. If they kill the current ecosystem or lock people into a narrow subset of it, there is no longer a market or ecosystem. Simple as.

The same is not true for Apple, who built an ecosystem from nothing. They're not cutting anyone off.

Most of the MS-oriented development staff I know (100+ people) are starting to look at exit strategies from the MS ecosystem. Most of them have Apple machines and/or Linux native machines and VM's on the go. Quite a few have jumped ship to Java enterprise outfits already.

When the rats start leaving...

I think the EU might get the nightstick out again if they pull this.

I wouldn't be surprised, but it would also be bullshit.

The same is not true for Apple, who built an ecosystem from nothing. They're not cutting anyone off.

Does WinRT have a history? I think it'd be pretty safe to say that WinRT is an ecosystem built from nothing in the same way iOS is a ecosystem built from nothing. It's using base technology from a much older system, but implemented in a completely different way. There is no current market or ecosystem for WinRT.

> Thanks to .NET support, Microsoft does have a measure support for alternative languages; it is the Common Language Runtime after all. What would be better though would be to support LLVM, as Apple does on iOS

this is super confusing. iOS can run LLVM bitcode? I would link to the "LLVM IR is a compiler IR" email, but UIUCs email archive server is down ...

Some people still seem to have problems discussing about compilers and respective runtimes.

That's just wrong anyway. You can't use .NET from RT. You can however provide new projections for another language though.

(Fun fact, there are now 3 C++ variants in Windows. C++ C++/CX C++/.NET)

How many variants of C are there in OS X? :)

Windows 8′s ‘dirty little secret

A dirty little secret which happens to be common knowledge and is mentioned in the tech press at least once a week for pretty much the last year. Yet somehow it still seems to provoke outrage from people who continue to insist that Microsoft is abusing a non-existent monopoly in a market they have no presence in.

I don't think a company needs a monopoly to be rightly slated over their anticompetitive actions.

Well, I don't want to have to buy a Mac and buy a copy of XCode to make an iOS app either, but that's pretty much accepted. You can use whatever you want to create a desktop program. If this decision was about destroying competitive languages and software, that seems like a pretty big oversight on the behalf of these evil masterminds.

edit - georgemcbay points out that XCode is free. My mistake.

Before anyone else jumps in on this one thing... XCode is free. However, the point is still valid.

Unless you're willing to enter the grey world of hackintoshing, you need a Mac to develop for iOS (required for code signing step) regardless of how you build your app, even if you use a third-party compiler like the MonoTouch one.

But Visual Studio Express is also free.

The shame in it all is that you can't just use the computer you already have. iOS development requires a Mac and Windows RT development requires Windows. It sucks when any manufacturer locks you in and prevents you from using portable code. It ups the expense of developing a cross-platform application significantly.

I guess at least if you own a Mac, you're allowed to run Windows on the hardware as well. The same can't be said in reverse, due to software licensing restrictions.

What bugs me about people saying that you need to buy a Mac for iOS development is that you need to buy a computer in order to do any software development. What do Windows developers develop on? Free computers? Is the criticism coming from Windows developers who don't want to buy a Mac to develop for iOS? :D

I could make an Android app on Linux or Windows or OSX. I could make a Windows program on Linux or Mac, and I could make a Linux program on Windows or Mac. I don't know if you could make a Mac program on Windows or Linux, but it might be possible. Point being, you can use the computer you already have.

My criticism of having to buy a Mac and use XCode to make an iOS app is in response to the criticism of having to use Windows and Visual Studio to make a Windows RT app. It's the same process. The only difference between Windows RT and iOS is that Microsoft lets you install Windows RT apps on a desktop/laptop as well as a tablet. Microsoft is far from pioneering this requirement by several years and half-a-million apps. Yet people are pushing this like it's a brand new Microsoft innovation.

I also think Apple are anticompetitive in many spheres, but that is not the subject of this discussion so I didn't bring it up.

common knowledge

I've known for a long time that you were restricted to certain APIs when making a Metro app. I had no idea that you could link dlls that had special exceptions, and that there was no way to get these exceptions for your own language runtime.

Is it really an issue? WinRt is a new platform and if I remember correctly, in the beginning you could not code against anything but the Dalvik VM on Android (that's Java) and iDevices could only be programmed in Objective C. The way I see technology moving anyway is that with cheap boards like Raspberry Pi and other cheap hardware like that, within 7 years, people will be able to mix and match components and build their own tablets just like they build PCs today. Within 4 years the vast majority of Shanzhai tablets will have more than 7 hours of usable battery life AND will be able to accept alternative operating systems like Puppy Linux, Debian or Firefox OS. By that time the new frontier will be wearable smart glasses, but how fancy does humanity need to get for cheap,ubiquitous portable computing? Windows RT, iOS and to a lesser extent, Android might be less relevant by then. Especially when you can run an IDE like GAMBAS on a humble Raspberry Pi with Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Linux fanboy; I like Windows too but the industry has a better chance of using a commodity OS than paying royalties to Microsoft for every Android device sold, like some manufacturers are already doing, or even paying $30 per device as in Apple's wet dreams...

But the Android vendors are already using a commodity OS in Linux, but still have to pay Microsoft patent royalties on it.

As far as I know, the payments are for Android-specific features that those devices use. I don't think it has ever been proven that Linux infringes Microsoft Patents. In fact Microsoft contributed code to Linux and continues to do so (81980085). If there are violations, the most serious are about some FAT/VFAT patents and the Linux developer community can come up with alternative filesystems on solid-state disks.

From http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...

<< But he does break down the total number allegedly violated - 235 - into categories. He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68. >>

So who must they sue? Right now, I'm sure Microsoft enjoys being perceived as less lawsuit-happy than Apple.

There's no point in using lawsuits to shut down someone you don't feel threatened by. It's bad press and a waste of money. Microsoft removed Linux from its list of threats [1] this year, and it's questionable to me if Linux was ever a threat to Microsoft's profits. Microsoft is unlikely to sue Linux developers in general for the reasons above, but once something rises above and becomes a threat (Android), they'll bring the hammer down.

Whether or not these patent claims are legitimate or not, some Android vendors apparently found that it was more cost-effective to license rather than battle it out in court.

[1] http://www.neowin.net/news/micorosft-no-longers-considers-li...

It's hard to collect royalties from individual users.

They will charge the manufacturers who in turn will charge you.

They can always learn from RIAA/MPAA folks.

I don't get this at all. You have to link against the same DLLs and you can only call a subset of system calls, but you can use whatever native code generator you want. MS isn't hexdumping the binary to see if the instruction ordering matches what VS generates. And if that's too hard, the tried and true technique of generating C code in your backend will surely work, as third party compilers have been doing for decades.

Third-party compilers are already locked out of Win32 development to a large degree thanks to patents on things like SEH (32-bit) and access to the native intrinsics. Why people are up in arms over WinRT is beyond me.

MinGW has worked on Windows for years, and has the advantage of working as a cross-compiler from other platforms, which makes it easier to build releases for multiple platforms on one system.

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