Accumulated cruft is the CF cost for an API.

I still think that it’s one of the great ironies of our time.

Linux itself bends over backwards to avoid breaking userland, to the point where there is a substantial amount of cruft when interacting directly with the kernel.

Only for GNU to say “fuck that” and create a widely mockable situation, one of the worst targets of modern programs for stability… to the point where people start using alternative libc’s specifically to statically link them.

What a monumental failure.

Not all parts of Win32 were designed equally well. File IO, process management and most of the threading primitivs have aged really well. Thread management hasn't. The GUI parts are a sometimes hacky mess because behavioral changes created mismatches between what functions were specified to do and what that gets actually translated to. Permissions are a pain in the butt with complex ACLs, transparent file access redirects and how process elevation works.