| > should be run under the Microsoft philosophy: you don’t get to decide what your stable interfaces are The philosophy only works because private APIs are hidden enough to reduce the effort required in maintaining backward compatibility. The fact that MS works (or rather, worked, it was much more vital in the Windows 95 transition) hard to maintain compatibility even on private dependencies doesn't mean that private doesn't mean anything. I think a bigger (and certainly more visible) element of the MS philosophy is in maintaining compatibility for public, stable APIs. For example, look at how Windows 10 still has all these old Control Panel dialogs. That's not incidental compatibility with undocumented APIs; it's designed for extensibility, the maintenance of which holds the whole platform back to a certain degree. I worked on the Delphi compiler and runtime library. Versioning was an exceedingly important concern. Patch releases couldn't break APIs because it could affect our partner market, if we affected the dependencies of third-party components, those third parties would need to re-release. The ecosystem only worked because there was a clear separation between public and private. You need private APIs because you need the flexibility to change things - if you can't change things, you must create everything perfectly first time, and that's just not possible. You might want to get access to the compiler internals, but if you build something nifty with that access, and that nifty thing gets widespread use, you will hold back the entire ecosystem. You will be the cause of warts like Windows 10's 20 year old Control Panel dialogs. |