Why Still Win32?

From	Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups	comp.os.linux.advocacy, comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy
Subject	Why Still Win32?
Date	2026-05-11 01:18 +0000
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<10trapk$pec6$2@dont-email.me> (permalink)

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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A candid admission from a Microsoft exec that the 30-over-year-old
“Win32” API still lies at the heart of Windows today
<https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-cto-confesses-that-30-year-old-code-from-the-mid-90s-still-forms-the-bedrock-of-windows-11-ancient-win32-api-still-the-backbone-but-cto-says-its-more-relevant-than-ever-in-2026>.

With 64-bit machines now commonplace and 32-bit ones practically
extinct (outside of some embedded uses), whatever happened to “Win64”?

Linux and *BSD systems base their APIs on POSIX, which was cleverly
designed right from the beginning not to have any assumptions about
being 32-bit versus 64-bit. The first 64-bit workstations were already
beginning to appear back then (though they were still unheard of in
the Windows world), so the *nix standards folks had to confront the
future pretty much from the beginning, they couldn’t put it off for
another decade, as Microsoft did.

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Why Still Win32? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-05-11 01:18 +0000
  Re: Why Still Win32? makendo <makendo@makendo.invalid> - 2026-05-12 12:27 +0800
    Re: Why Still Win32? Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-05-12 04:52 +0000
      Re: Why Still Win32? rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-05-12 23:15 +0000
    Re: Why Still Win32? rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-05-12 23:14 +0000

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