Indicators and traction…

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 11:25:57 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
wrote:
> On 24-Sep-2015 13:51, Joakim wrote:
>> No wonder Windows is a dying platform, given what he laid out 
>> there.
>
> Much as I'd like that to be true, the opposite might be the 
> current situation. See all the new shiny and dead-simple APIs 
> or Windows 10 Universal Apps ...
>
> And you know where most developers flow - like watter - where 
> it's easiest to pass.

Oh, if you use one of the established languages that MS already 
supports fully through their toolchain, I don't doubt it's easy.  
However, perhaps you're unaware, but there's a lot of 
hand-wringing in the Windows camp about how nobody develops for 
Windows anymore and Microsoft themselves are developing first for 
other OS's:

https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/3174/windows-android
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/5818/and-the-biggest-problem-with-windows-10-is
https://www.thurrott.com/office/5904/because-microsoft-comes-first-not-windows-or-surface

Part of that is that Windows failed on mobile, which is where a 
lot of new app development takes place these days.  But part of 
it is that MS seems stuck in the past, with issues like not 
documenting their debuginfo format, where they still act like an 
OS monopoly when they're not even the majority computing platform 
anymore.  They've got to up their game to stay relevant, but 
perhaps they're not capable of that anymore.

On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 13:04:38 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 September 2015 at 10:51:09 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> btw, Walter wrote up a nice article in 2012 laying out all he 
>> had to go through to get dmd working on Win64:
>
> The beauty of Windows though is you don't actually need to do 
> anything to actually work on the new versions. Your old tricks 
> generally still work.

Yes, all the old win32 apps still work on win64.  But you not 
only need legacy support but new apps coming on board.  That's 
where they're failing, and not enabling new languages is part of 
the problem.