From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Feb 26 09:38:04 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA03091 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:38:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from covina.lightside.com (covina.lightside.com [198.81.209.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id JAA03084 for ; Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:38:03 -0800 (PST) Received: from hamby1.lightside.net by covina.lightside.com with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #6) id m0tr6rZ-0009YrC; Mon, 26 Feb 96 09:37 PST Received: by hamby1.lightside.net with Microsoft Mail id <01BB042E.4636BDE0@hamby1.lightside.net>; Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:39:07 -0800 Message-ID: <01BB042E.4636BDE0@hamby1.lightside.net> From: Jake Hamby To: "'Christoph Kukulies'" , "'Narvi'" Cc: "'invalid opcode'" , "'jehamby@lightside.com'" , "'hackers@FreeBSD.ORG'" Subject: RE: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:38:53 -0800 Encoding: 29 TEXT Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk >A point about which I must disagree... Win32 is not as good. Perhaps it >will never be (just think about DOS - it *did* become better over the >time of it's existence). If the things go on as they are now, IMHO >FreeBSD will have better SMP support than Win32... It's VERY popular, though! :-) It has a lot of features from Unix (e.g. Winsock, memory-mapped files, etc..) and features that Unix will never have a standard for (e.g. context-sensitive hypertext help, unified printing system, unified TrueType font system, OLE). Now I agree that, for example, OpenDoc is superior to OLE, but OLE has been around for several years now, and OpenDoc is just coming out. The other problem is that you COULD put all the features I mentioned into an X program (help, printing, fonts, etc), but you'd have to either buy somebody else's code, or write your own, and either way you end up spending way more time and/or money, and get a program which looks very different from others of its kind. >Emulating another system is never as good as running in native mode, no >matter how hard you try. How about making headers and libraries which >would allow you to compile you win32 code for FreeBSD and X11 with little >to no changes? It would allow all those shareware people list that their >products are available for several platrorms, one of which is real unix :) As I mentioned, there is ALREADY a toolkit to do this called TWIN, from Willows software (www.willows.com). You can compile Windows (and soon Win32) programs to native code using GCC or any other compiler. Already it is in a much better state than WINE, and it is free for non-commercial development. This was one big reason for me to decide to learn Win32. ---Jake