[overgard]

Well, that's kind of what I'm driving at with things like the win32 api being a bit too high level and still kind of sucking. An example would be the GDI (the way you draw simple graphics). Like, it's in the worst of both worlds in that it's both slow and annoying to use. Or you can use DirectX and draw things fast, but you need to know a lot more. I think my point is mainly that OS's might be better off just giving you things like DirectX (and mmap and ioctl, etc.) and leaving off things like the GDI.

I know right now Microsoft keeps making like 50000 new UI frameworks and part of me is like, just knock it the fuck off, give me some style guidelines and some super-efficient very low level no-frills API's and let me just build apps off a library like Qt that abstracts it.