From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Feb 26 09:38:13 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA03118 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:38:13 -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 JAA03106 for ; Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:38:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from hamby1.lightside.net by covina.lightside.com with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #6) id m0tr6rd-0009YyC; Mon, 26 Feb 96 09:37 PST Received: by hamby1.lightside.net with Microsoft Mail id <01BB042E.49006530@hamby1.lightside.net>; Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:39:12 -0800 Message-ID: <01BB042E.49006530@hamby1.lightside.net> From: Jake Hamby To: "'invalid opcode'" , "'Christoph Kukulies'" Cc: "'jehamby@lightside.com'" , "'hackers@FreeBSD.ORG'" Subject: RE: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:38:56 -0800 Encoding: 29 TEXT Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk >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