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by derefr 1122 days ago
It's odd that it failed; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ThinApp was doing this literally 20 years ago and worked just fine. (I used it myself.)

IIRC, it used a filesystem driver shim that rerouted all FS writes during installation into an overlay filesystem image; and then generated a self-unpacking executable, embedding that overlay image, that unpacked the core EXE and spawned it shimmed to read from the overlay image.

What did Windows 10X do that was different than that?
2 comments
jcelerier 1122 days ago
> worked just fine. (I used it myself.)

a lot of things work just fine and are still failures from the management's point-of-view

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gjsman-1000 1122 days ago
They attempted to abuse/reuse a in-house technology called VAIL. There were not just some compatibility issues; but battery life and performance were just bad.
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derefr 1121 days ago
Virtualized Application Interface Layer… did anyone internally refer to this as “WINE for Windows”? ;)

From a quick web search, VAIL was supposed to only be used as a fallback for when RAIL (i.e. a cloud streaming service for your Win32 apps) wasn’t available. So I assume it didn’t necessarily have to be “good” — it was the “safe mode” of Win32 compatibility, per se. It just had to be there as a rare last resort.

But was RAIL any good? Did it even get built?

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