On 2012-08-22 06:32:29 +0000, "Paulo Pinto" <pj...@progtools.org> said:
On Wednesday, 22 August 2012 at 00:15:12 UTC, David Piepgrass wrote:
Lets see how the improved COM (WinRT) turns out to be.
Sadly, WinRT is again intended to be Windows-only, so developers like
me that hate lock-in will avoid it in preference for .NET (hi Mono!)
and yucky old C.
Because UNIX systems are still in the stone age in terms of ABI, as they
barely changes since the 70's and no one seems to care enough to change things.
I like UNIX a lot, but got to know it, after knowing what is possible
in more advanced languages, so it always dismays me that specially when
dealing with most commercial UNIX it feels like being in the 70's
computing age.
So that lives only Apple and Microsoft with room for real OS innovation
in mainstream OS, and like any vendor they prefer to look for solutions
that fit only their OS.
Mac OS x is also UNIX, but Apple has been changing it already quite a
lot compared with the other vendors, hence my Apple remark.
Actually, the difference is standardization. Microsoft's COM and
Apple's Objective-C runtime are built on top of C APIs (and you can
access them through C if you want, although it's a little awkward). COM
implementations and Objective-C runtime implementations exist for other
UNIXes too, as well as other similar things, but no one is pushing them
enough for them to become a standard.
--
Michel Fortin
michel.for...@michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/
