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Comment by eulerphi | Hacker News Reader

Apple was smart and basically repurposed the OSX API for ios. But they always had a good API. The original windows API is water trash. .Net is nice.

The only thing MS needs to do is go modern instead of legacy for their new phones, but is that going to happen?

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> The original windows API is water trash.

You know, I let it slide when the comment you replied to said it, but I disagree with this one. IMO most people who criticize Win32 just aren't familiar with it. I've heard plenty of people dismiss objc on similar grounds: simple unfamiliarity becomes "this is bad". Once you get over the initial learning curve it's quite easy to be productive with it.

Kernel32 user32, advapi32, etc. Are you really going to tell me that the namespacing and naming convention for their API, which mind you, used handles and annoying type defs, was anything spectacular. I really hope you are kidding. I reverse engineered windows for years, know a huge amount of documented and undocumented api from ntdll and so on. The API is water trash, you lose when you question my know-how on this topic.

I was on the Windows team for a few years. I have seen the source code. There is cruft as there will be with any project of its age, but it's not nearly as bad as people say, especially if you can navigate it well. There are some good ideas underneath. COM is generally a good idea. The mental model of message pumps and window procs doesn't really have deep flaws, and lots of UI frameworks on other platforms have the same ideas under the hood. You mention ntdll, it's a shame more of that isn't public, because those APIs are often cleaner than their public equivalents.

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