> Comparing the comprehensive Win32 API reference against the incidentally documented Native APIs, its clear which one Microsoft would prefer you use. The native API is treated as an implementation detail, whilst core parts of Windows' backwards compatibility strategy are implemented in Windows subsystem.
> A general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Zig clearly doesn't actually care that much about building robust and reusable software if they're going to forgo Microsoft's decades-long backwards compatibility functionality for the dubious gains of using bare-metal APIs.
They defer all very real issues caused by their approach as being problems for others to solve (wine, antiviruses, users, even microsoft). That's such a weird level of hubris.
I think the only place where avoiding win32 is desirable is to write drivers, but zig already has support for some level of bare-metal development and I'm sure a package can provide shims to all ntdll utilities for that use-case.
I think it's pretty clear that they're doing it because it's a more fun challenge. As a low-level developer myself, I agree that using the lowest-level API possible is fun, especially if it's poorly documented and you have to try to try to preemptively mitigate breakage! But this is no mentality to have when you're writing a language ecosystem...
The Zig maintainers clearly think that keeping up with the undocumented native API is less headache than using the documented but notoriously inelegant win32 API.
This might very well be a good idea. Microsoft is not going to change a vital piece of their OS just on a whim. I would wager that even if they wanted to, they would not be able to do so that easily. A large organization maintaining a large software with a billion users just does not move that fast.
Take a random Linux binary which does anything non-trivial (has a GUI, does system monitoring, etc.), try running it on a different distribution from 3 years earlier without a packaging system, and tell me how it goes.
What confuses me the most is the kernel goes actually to great lengths not to break userspace, but if you rely on anything else than the kernel stuff breaks all the time, and distributions never update a released version to a newer kernel but just patch old kernels for years. So why do the kernel developers even bother?
Zig is proposing the opposite problem: future versions of windows wont run even trivial zig programs from today.
I can tell you that old Linux binaries run just fine on current distros.
Looking at how many times you repeated your misunderstanding in this thread it's clear that, not only do you not understand the solution, you don't understand the problem either.
I was a "Windows guy" from Windows 2.0 to Windows 10. Now I'm a "Mac guy."
These operating systems aren't my family members -- I'll ditch them if I believe that switching is worth getting over the learning curve of a new environment.
I used 250lb zip ties to hold down my convertible top in the open position, as an alternative to paying $2000 to replace the motors. When I'd need to put up the top I'd cut the zip ties and when I'd want to put it down I'd put on a new set.
With California weather and an indoor parking spot I only ended up using about one pack (10? 12?) a year.
I can't help thinking that people here in Scotland with convertibles (of which there are a surprising number) would probably use less than you per year ;-)
The convertible is still the car, not a convertible kilt(?!), GP is saying with Scottish as opposed to Californian weather there would be less changing. Say, a single open-top-weather period (two changes) per year. Or none.
(I imagine the Californian poster is changing twice per year too, just using 5-6 ties. With that reading the joke is Hey in Scotland you just keep it closed, never need any more ties.)
Let me guess, you don't need to look at the weather, you know it is THE day when your inbox is full at 9am of messages from most of your colleagues taking the day off?
Maybe surface parking lots aren't the answer, but I do know that if there are places that I can't easily park at, I just don't go there unless absolutely necessary.
Nice to think, "the people will take trains!" but sometimes it doesn't work that way.
Sure, removing parking essentially requires the neighborhood to become more self-sustaining. This works in really dense cities like New York and San Francisco but it requires enough desirability to fill the housing with people who have enough disposable income to replace the far bigger "catchment area" that the parking used to serve.
Which in turn affects the kind of economies that the new development can support. A car dealership? Needs parking and a large catchment area. Burrito shop? Probably not getting much destination traffic and can support itself on locals.
Those people may not be enough to support them. Cars take up space, but houses take up even more space. It is really easy for a Downtown to go into a downward spiral if you take away the ability of people to get there.
It need not happen, but all too often simple answers are wrong.
> It is really easy for a Downtown to go into a downward spiral if you take away the ability of people to get there.
I've seen this sad downward spiral multiple times, it is not a good outcome.
I used to live not too far from a town with a mellow but nice downtown center. Not a huge draw but many small nice restaurants and shops and there was steady business. Sensing a profit machine, the city filled all streets with parking meters. Turns out that while it was a nice area, it wasn't so irreplaceable, so nobody goes anymore. Business collapsed. I drove by last summer and everything is closed, the parking meters sit empty.
Same is happening now to the downtown one town over. It used to very vibrant awesome downtown, although small. Bars, restaurants, music venues, fun shops. I was there every night for something or other. Loved it. Easy free parking around. Some of the parking lots have office buildings now and the city lots have become very expensive. Much less activity there now, about a third of the venues are closed and the remaining ones are saying they can't last very long with fewer people going. While in its heyday this downtown was far more active than my first example, turns out it wasn't irreplaceable either. People just don't go anymore.
Point is that this tactic works only when the downtown is so established and so dense that people are going to go anyway even if parking is hard, like Manhattan.
> ome of the parking lots have office buildings now and the city lots have become very expensive. Much less activity there now, about a third of the venues are closed and the remaining ones are saying they can't last very long with fewer people going.
Sounds to me like that found a valueable use for their land and got rid of the low value things you really enjoyed...
Of course to you this is bad, and the city lost the night life, but that might or might not be worse overall. They seem to be a denser area despite it, for whatever that means.
> Sounds to me like that found a valueable use for their land and got rid of the low value things you really enjoyed...
That would be the case if the storefronts didn't just wind up remaining empty. Empty commercial real estate is rife in the US right now.
Your "No Parking" area always has competition from the suburbs in the US. If you make parking too problematic, things can invert. Then, people will save up tasks for their trip to the burbs and be completely inert locally--they will do next to nothing with local businesses, do everything inside their house (way cheaper, you know, since I bought the stuff at Costco) and the car remains parked and unmoving until their next trip to the burbs. Once that inversion happens, your "walkable business area" spirals into more and more empty storefronts and the decline becomes ridiculously difficult to arrest.
> Point is that this tactic works only when the downtown is so established and so dense that people are going to go anyway even if parking is hard, like Manhattan.
Or the facilitating of cars has now made it more unattractive for people to go and hangout there even if it is easier to drive to.
Has there ever been a situation where taking away parking has lead to traffic dropping?
I've heard this, but I've never seen an example in practice. It seems like making things more walkable and bikeable, at the expense of cars, always increases foot-traffic, with no exception.
Yes, though I can't recall enough details that I could help you search.
Basically anytime it is tried in the suburbs where nobody is walking now nothing changes. When a lot of people are already walking you can increase traffic by getting rid of cars.
Details matter, most of the places people take aware cars are already dense areas and they tell you about it. However in a few cases someone who hasn't understood the context tried to apply a lesson it doesn't apply and it fails.
Good point. And 'yard', if any. You can even see this at large events that are in urban centers.
Churchill Downs for example is surrounded by residential properties. At Derby time a lot of those enterprising people would let you park in their yard for $5 or $10 (maybe more now, it's been many years). These are not large properties - typical older shotgun houses. I seem to remember them getting 10 or more cars and that's not even counting the space the house itself is taking up.
Sure, but this is why it makes sense to do it gradually. Things get built slowly and if the new buildings are taller they may actually take up less space (per person) than a car does, when considering ingress, egress, the road itself, etc.
IMO places need to be transitioned thoughtfully. Eliminate some parking here, build dense infill, then some more parking. Over time you can manage modal share so car volumes become insignificant relative to transit, walking, and biking. Basically if you’re going to remove 100 parking spaces, you should add n housing units, and so on.
When I choose where to go, I look if I'll be able to park there, and if not - I will always be able to find another place. Parking availability is number one priority, not star rating or $$$
Am I the only person on Earth who would stop going to downtown restaurants if parking became inaccessible? I don't think so, but your guess is as good as mine
I've seen so many outright falsehoods in Google AI overviews that I've stopped reading them. They're either not willing to incur the cost or latency it would take to make them useful.
Spotify changed their API policy last year – getting extended quota as an indie dev is tough now. They want commercial partnerships or big user numbers. By having users create their own Spotify app, each user has their own quota and I don't need to go through Spotify's approval process.
Apple Music via MusicKit doesn't have that restriction – just works with the user's subscription.
It's not clear from the top posts here what on Earth is happening. I've been a longtime customer of both Sparkfun and Adafruit for my kids. What do I need to know?
The only thing you need to know is Sparkfun doesn't distribute Adafruit products. There are other distributors you can find with a web search, or you can buy from Adafruit's website.
Elon doesn't bring huge amounts of time to his companies, he brings some sort of skill which I don't know how to characterize but empirically must exist given the level of repeatable success he's had.
If there was a job description to "throw this football 50 yards into a trash can, a couple of times per week" I wouldn't be able to do the job at all, but an NFL quarterback might be able to do the job for 5 different companies while also Tweeting 50 times a day.
No, it's clearly much more than that. He was able to get Grok to a frontier-level LLM while Apple and Microsoft, with far more money to throw at the problem, and more existentially threatened by not succeeding, have not.
Is there any secret sauce behind LLM other than big money? I'm under the impression that its a known recipe at its core and for many of the enhancements around it.
Maybe, but there is also the potential for survivorship bias being a factor here too. The chance that a specific person with no football skills can throw a football 50 yards into a trash can is pretty low. But if you gather a stadium full of unskilled random people, chances are good that one of them will be able to do so, even multiple times. But you'd be wasting your time trying to discern what special football skill that person has.
I'm not saying this means successful CEOs don't have any relevant skills contributing to their success, but it's worth considering that for the most part we're only seeing the successful ones. It's hard to say how many would-be billionaire CEOs are out there with similar skills to someone like Elon Musk who just happened to get unlucky.
> A general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Zig clearly doesn't actually care that much about building robust and reusable software if they're going to forgo Microsoft's decades-long backwards compatibility functionality for the dubious gains of using bare-metal APIs.
reply