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Date:      Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:38:56 -0800
From:      Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>
To:        "'invalid opcode'" <coredump@nervosa.com>, "'Christoph Kukulies'" <kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de>
Cc:        "'jehamby@lightside.com'" <jehamby@lightside.com>, "'hackers@FreeBSD.ORG'" <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...)
Message-ID:  <01BB042E.49006530@hamby1.lightside.net>

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>I think one has to considerate this sincerely. Is anyone following what's
>the Wine project is heading? I think that Win32 on top of a rock solid
>OS like FreeBSD would be a perfect marriage. I see a strong need for a
>unified GUI in the Unix world and be it Win32. Wait two years and all
>existing 16bit and segmentation anachronisms will be thrown overboard.
>Then we will face a exploding Win32 world (under a merged WinNT4.0 and
>Win97). It's time to wake up.

Isn't that what TWIN from Willows software is up to?  Check out 
www.willows.com, they already have a Windows API developers kit for Unix 
which you can get for free for noncommercial work.  According to the 
developer I talked to (Rob Farnum) they are working to support the full 
Win32 API by June, and are looking for Win32 binary compatibility by the 
end of this year.  Already TWIN looks like a better bet than WINE, 
especially since the focus is on recompiling Windows apps natively to Unix 
(using GCC or another compiler).

And I agree with you on the Windows API.  Motif is just too big, slow, 
expensive, and difficult to program.  And my big complaints with Windows in 
the past were basically complaints with its 16-bit segmented nature, and 
the underlying DOS, neither of which exist in Windows NT (and are present 
to a much lesser extent in Windows 95).  The only problem with something 
like TWIN is that now I've progressed to writing C++ programs using MFC, 
and nobody has written a clone of that yet, and although MS gives away the 
source code, they won't let you recompile it for non-Windows operating 
systems, from what I understand.  :-(

---Jake




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