OpenEuphoria

Re: More projects?

• Posted by Vincent <darkvincentdude at yahoo.com> Dec 28, 2005
• 486 views

C Bouzy wrote:

> The Win32API will still be in use 7 years from now, it is not going
> anywhere. Personally I do not see any major advantages of supporting
> other OSes, especially when they only represent 5-7% of ALL computers
> in the world. This means if there were only 1000 computer users in the
> world, approximately 50 would have one of the OSes you mentioned. And
> out of that 50, how many would be using EU?. So Robert is putting in all 
> his time and effort to support other platforms for a handful of users.
> I remember when everyone said Linux would replace Windows, 7 years later
> and Windows is still the dominate OS. Linux is open source and even the
> commercial versions are dramatically cheaper than Windows, and Linux
> still does not have half of the marketshare.

I bet a significant number of Euphoria programmers who use and write code for
both Windows and Linux, while others may use Linux period. I'm sure there are
even some who use the FreeBSD version, though not as many as with DOS or Linux.
Although I currently only use the Windows and DOS versions, I often write my code
with cross-platform in mind. Euphoria's support for multiple platforms gives me
piece of mind that I'm not just limited to one platform if I chose to switch to
Linux or BSD. I wouldn't be part of this community today if it wasn't for
Euphoria's multi-platform support, despite it's other obvious benefits. I'm just
no longer interested in any platform specific languages.

You suggest that the Windows 32 API will remain in use 7 years from now, but
fail to explain why the majority of developers would still wish to use an old
technology when they could use .NET or WinFX and gain much greater productivity
in almost every aspect of Windows software development. I am fairly certain it's
Microsoft's plan to phase out the aging Win32 API with the new WinFX
infrastructure by the end of this decade. While the existing APIs probably wont
be removed, their main purpose will likely become solely for supporting existing
Win32 applications and for software maintenance. Microsoft is confident though
that most of these projects will eventually be converted to the .NET so that
developers could benefit from their high-level object oriented programming
platform.

Needless to say, I believe any initiative at this point to hamper Euphoria
support across other platforms could have lethal consequences with an already
struggling language!


Regards,
Vincent