[Info-vax] VSI licensing policy (again), was: Re: VSI has a new CEO

[David Goodwin]

On Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 8:32:37 PM UTC+12, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 9:23:00 AM UTC+12, Michael S wrote: 
> > 
> > According to my understanding, not many apps are readily available on WinArm in native form 
> > apart from Microsoft Office suite and Firefox.
> On top of which, Microsoft’s x86 emulator only handles 32-bit code, not AMD64. The only thing that makes that palatable is the fact that much of Windows code never made the transition to 64-bit anyway. 

That's because for most applications unless you need to allocate more than 2GB of RAM there is little benefit in being 64bit - all it really does is increase memory consumption a bit and probably CPU cache misses as well.

> > But in theory, most of in-house stuff nowadays is written in .Net ... 
> 
> What, not Dotnet Core? What happened to Win64? Silverlight? WinRT? UWP? How many versions of “Project Reunion” have there been? 
> 
> I don’t think Windows developers can say with any certainty right now which of Microsoft’s many platform APIs is the “core” one going forward...

.net core is just a newer version of .net same as Java 7 is a newer version of Java. Microsoft has actually dropped the 'core' branding now - the most recent version is simply called .net 5.  Win64 is still around and still enhanced - lots of stuff is built against the C API and it will never go away. Silverlight died for the same reason Flash did. WinRT is still around. As is UWP.

And, importantly, all of these things are still supported on current windows. Even the VB6 runtime is still supported on current windows. This is a substantially better situation than on Linux where you'd have a hard time building a Qt 3 application from source on a recent Ubuntu release and running an existing Qt 3 binary is impossible unless it happened to be statically linked (and even then there is a good chance it won't work properly)

It would sure be nice if Microsoft would just pick a UI toolkit and stick with it but Microsoft is by no means alone when it comes to this problem.