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by Aloha 905 days ago
A modernized version of Toolbox in the form of Carbon running as native unix applications in a preemptive multitasking system on A/UX would have been pretty good - maybe not as good as Cocoa, but good enough probably.

Is win32 fundamentally worse than Carbon or Cocoa? if so it seems to have not meaningfully effected the success of Windows.
3 comments
giantrobot 905 days ago
That might have been good enough for 1998 but I don't think it would have been as workable in 2008 and later in 2018. Remember without acquiring NeXT they wouldn't have also gotten NeXT's engineers and management. Apple obviously had management issues in the early 90s. The management that led to the failures of Pink/Taligent and Copland wouldn't have suddenly built a great OS just because there was a Unix kernel underneath. Hell, the best Mac development APIs came from third parties (Symantec then MetroWerks) rather than Apple themselves.

Win32 is a bit different than Toolbox/Carbon. For one Microsoft had superior first party development offerings. The best development tools on the Mac were from third parties that were increasingly disinterested in the platform. Windows was also an order of magnitude larger of a market. An ISV suffering through the pain of Win32 had a huge TAM in front of them. They could be profitable by only reaching a small fraction. An ISV targeting the Mac platform had a much harder time breaking even to say nothing of profitability just due to the size and nature of the Mac market.

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sillywalk 904 days ago
Interestingly, a group reverse-engineered the Mac Toolbox and used it for "native" ports to Unix of, among other things, PhotoShop and Illustrator.

http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...

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pjmlp 905 days ago
The thing with raw Win32 is that only hard-core C folks use it as is.

It is similar to using Carbon.

Already in the Win16 days, anyone that cared about productivity was using C++ frameworks like OWL, Turbo Pascal, later MFC/VCL, Delphi, VB.

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runjake 905 days ago
To your point the “Hello World” Win32 C example in Charles Petzold’s earlier editions of Programming Windows is infamous.

http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2014/12/The-Infamous-Wind...

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pjmlp 905 days ago
Yeah, one of the things Windows 3.1 brought was message crackers and a strict mode via windowsx.h.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/windowsx...

However still painful versus the C++, Delphi, VB alternatives.

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