[meaty]

Are you serious?

I wrote an x86 NT utility back in 1996 on NT4 (with no service packs). It still executes and works perfectly on an x64 Windows 8 machine.

That's a mere 17 years ago.

There are two APIs now. The old one isn't going away either.

[AnthonyMouse]

I don't think the OP was talking about breaking backward compatibility with Win32. More like releasing a version of "Java" that produced bytecode that wouldn't run on anything but Microsoft's virtual machine. Or just the general and continuing behavior of Microsoft's developer tools to produce and encourage developers to write software that only runs or runs properly on Windows.

[meaty]

Well what do you expect them to do?

I think they would be batshit insane to do otherwise.

[AnthonyMouse]

I expect them to do what they've been doing. They're Microsoft. That's what they do. That's the problem.

Nobody wants to be locked into a single vendor's platform. It's good for the vendor and bad for everybody else. How can they be surprised that everybody else now dislikes them for doing it?

[meaty]

Th problem is whatever you do you're locked into an ecosystem of some sort. Even open source software. Have you tried building a portable c program on windows, Linux and OSX? Java is the least painless thing but we all know that's just another ecosystem.

The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.

To be honest, most people really don't give a shit. The next cigarette or pay day is far more important. Perhaps I'm getting old, but there are more important things to worry about.

[AnthonyMouse]

>Th problem is whatever you do you're locked into an ecosystem of some sort.

The difference is that not all ecosystems are tied to a single vendor. Nobody has a lock on POSIX or Java like Microsoft has on Win32. And the hardest part of getting a portable C program to run on Windows, Linux and OSX is to get the program that was much more easily ported between Linux and OSX to run on Windows, because Microsoft has to do a million inane things like using WSAGetLastError instead of errno just to be different.

>The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.

I don't think people forgot that. We've just started building shit for and on non-Microsoft platforms and found it to our liking.