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by tinus_hn 1513 days ago
Windows does not use a window manager like X does; the frames are drawn and managed by a library used by all applications, it’s not a separate program.

I’m not 100% sure but I’d say it’s pretty likely Mac OS works the same way, just like on Mac OS the left part of the menu bar (including the system menu) is drawn and managed by the current application (using a system library so the application developer doesn’t have to worry about how it works).

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> on Mac OS the left part of the menu bar (including the system menu) is drawn and managed by the current application

IIRC it is not drawn by the application, it's a system app that gets the focused (or rather, activated) app menu hierarchy as the app instructs through some IPC, but it's not the app process itself drawing there. The only part where an app actually can draw is on the right part, when one implements menu bar extras (which previously required hacks to inject into because the menubar extra API was severely limited, but IIUC now has a dedicated, managed API to replace the hacks)

Fun fact about the top level menu: it’s one of the last Carbon-heavy things around, at least last I checked.