[HN Gopher] Did you ever need to run a piece of C# code on Windo...
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Did you ever need to run a piece of C# code on Windows 3.11?
Author : lelf
Score : 206 points
Date : 2020-01-10 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| jugg1es wrote:
| His twitter feed is pretty interesting. He's a damn wizard.
| https://twitter.com/MStrehovsky/status/1214542538079690757
| yread wrote:
| How come there are so many Slovak and Czech people working on
| .NET Core at MS? Tomas Petricek, Karel Zikmund, Jan Kotas, Jan
| Vorlicek, Tomas Matousek,...
| MStrehovsky wrote:
| (Author of the "C# on Windows 3.11" hack here - and a Slovak.)
|
| I would say the concentration of Czech/Slovak people around
| .NET at MS is a result of accidents and networking. I got into
| the team thanks to a friend of a friend who heard I was
| interested. But yeah, it's a surprising number given the size
| of the population of Slovakia and Czech republic.
|
| There's a newly opened .NET development center in Prague so the
| number is likely going to grow (they do hire from all over the
| world though): https://karelz.github.io/hiring_prague_net/.
| flamtap wrote:
| Could be as simple as a networking thing. Czech/Slovak people
| know Czech/Slovak people, those people get recommended, etc.
| JoeMayoBot wrote:
| Great minds - Microsoft is an increasingly diverse company and
| you'll see smart people from everywhere in the world there.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Aye. My team in DevDiv (home of .NET) had a Brit (me), a
| Turkish lady, two Russians, two Canadians (one French), three
| Indians, my lead was Mexican, and only 1 American.
| jhkjhtiou45 wrote:
| Could be that they aqui-hired some Slovak/Czech company that
| ended up working on .NET Core.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Holy backwards compatibility, Microsoft!
| egdod wrote:
| Raymond Chen has lot of good stories about the lengths
| Microsoft would go to to ensure old programs still worked.
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history
| mister_hn wrote:
| Try it now MacOS X
| blinkingled wrote:
| I'm ok with Apple having different priorities so long as it
| benefits the end users of the product (and I'm sure some
| people will go to lengths to make up end user benefits ) but
| whenever I use OS X I just don't see any benefits of not
| having backwards compatibility - it's not faster than Windows
| , nor stabler, it's not like it updates faster and it's only
| getting iOS features backported. So it feels like not caring
| about backward compat is just a self serving easy way out for
| Apple.
| jtdev wrote:
| > " it's not faster than Windows , nor stabler"
|
| Couldn't disagree more; ctrl-alt-del gets a LOT of use on
| every Windows OS and client software combination I've ever
| used - I can't even remember the equivalent hotkey on MacOS
| although it's now been my daily driver for ~2 years of
| heavy use.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Cmd-Opt-Esc on a Mac is analogous to Ctrl-Shift-Esc on a
| Windows machine (Cmd-Alt-Del brings you back to the login
| page with a button to open task manager on post-Vista
| Windows PCs).
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I have to force quit apps all the time on macOS. I'll
| admit I also routinely forget the key combination, but
| that's just because the Dock makes force quitting easy,
| and the Windows task bar does not (afaik).
| JonathonW wrote:
| Recent versions of Windows have gotten pretty good at
| identifying programs that aren't responding and offering
| to close them; it's gotten pretty rare that I actually
| have to open Task Manager to close a program. macOS, on
| the other hand, never offers to kill a hanging program--
| it'll let an application beach ball for hours until you
| go out of your way to force quit it via the Dock or
| keyboard shortcut.
|
| At any rate, the applications that make up most of my
| daily work are all really stable these days-- we've come
| a long way since the Classic MacOS and Windows 9x days
| where application (and OS) crashes and freezes were a
| daily occurence.
| blinkingled wrote:
| I don't remember using Ctrl+Alt+Del on any personal
| Windows machine either. It's the corporate client systems
| that make you use it for login. Heck on surface devices
| you don't even have to touch the keyboard to login :)
|
| I haven't had the need to kill anything using task
| manager either so not sure what I would use CAD for.
| [deleted]
| jhkjhtiou45 wrote:
| > _So it feels like not caring about backward compat is
| just a self serving easy way out for Apple._
|
| I think there is more to it. I think is because they
| actually don't want obsolete software to be seen on their
| computers. Imagine people posting a picture with a Macbook
| on Instagram, and you see some ugly 1990 piece of software
| running on it. Not cool. So from time to time they remove
| whole frameworks, to force developers to re-implement the
| app in a new one, which is prettier. If no one is still
| around to maintain the app, that's ok too.
|
| This is why you don't see any ugly software on Macs, they
| make sure to purge it every 5 years or so.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| This is the only kind of backward compatibility Apple
| cares about:
|
| https://youtu.be/Ja1vMy88_bA
| vortico wrote:
| It's funny that someone else on HN just managed to run a Java
| program on Amiga 1000.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011199
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| the last 2 articles from this dude have amazed me. he is a
| NINJA!!!
| Dutchie2020 wrote:
| Love this guy, make sure you check out his 8kb C# game:
| https://medium.com/@MStrehovsky/building-a-self-contained-ga...
| zip1234 wrote:
| It really is a great article and truly interesting techniques
| to get the size down.
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| That's like gold to me. Really useful tips right there. At
| the end things went crazy haha. I'm satisfied with 1MB size
| hahah.
| fuball63 wrote:
| I've been seeing a lot of stuff about Windows 3.11 lately, did
| they release it free recently? Like they did early versions of
| MSDOS? https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS
| neurostimulant wrote:
| People uploads a lot of old Microsoft OSes and software on
| Internet Archive [1], but curiously, no one uploaded Windows
| 3.11 installer yet (plenty of Windows 3.1 though). I wonder
| why. Legal reason?
|
| [1]
| https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Microsoft%...
| Macha wrote:
| The author mentioned in a reply that they got their copy with a
| VS subscription.
| fuball63 wrote:
| If anyone else is curious what else you can get, Microsoft
| publishes this Excel list: https://download.microsoft.com/dow
| nload/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-...
| sebazzz wrote:
| Yes, and until about a year back Windows 95 and 98 were
| available also but they have been taken offline. If I recall
| it correctly it is due to some copyright issue.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Didn't Windows 95 and Windows 98 include Java by default?
| Probably yet another side-effect of the Oracle-Google
| thing.
| pram wrote:
| Microsoft Java (lol) and they already were sued about it
| ;P
| stkdump wrote:
| Oh, I remember J++! The glorious embrace and extend
| days...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| J++ is a big part of why C# exists today.
| Nitramevfank wrote:
| Isn't that a back backwards? Isn't it more like:
| Microsoft wanted a more modern language and they weren't
| allowed to use Java so they created c#?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Microsoft thought Java was a good idea in that they liked
| the JVM a lot, but the language itself they saw as flawed
| and missing key features that would make it a truly
| modern language, in particular they heavily disagreed
| with Sun's approach to FFI (foreign function interface)
| [Java's slow, laborious efforts eventually building JNI,
| the Java Native Interface], because of their many years
| of experience for better and worse with COM (component
| object model).
|
| J++ was never meant to be "Java", and never technically
| was even in branding, it was essentially a second
| language (that Microsoft saw at the time as C++ is to C,
| it was to Java, and that's very clearly represented in
| that brand name) that also targeted the Microsoft version
| of the JVM, and used a couple Microsoft-specific escape
| hatches for FFI and COM.
|
| (So it absolutely was an "embrace and extend", but it
| wasn't of the Java language itself so much as it was the
| JVM that Microsoft wanted to embrace and extend that
| seemed to fright Sun so badly. That's probably why so
| much of the legal drama and the consequent blows to the
| rest of the Java ecosystem at the time was Sun
| withdrawing JVM licenses from just about everyone as a
| part of that battle. Originally Sun seemed rather happy
| licensing the JVM to whoever wanted to implement it,
| which is why Microsoft had a JVM in the first place,
| thinking controlling the Java language was enough. Sun
| worked to put that genie back in the bottle and move
| everyone back to mostly a single JVM again. There's no
| lack of irony in the exact same battle playing out
| between Oracle and Google decades later in the battle of
| Dalvik [Google's JVM] and Android.)
|
| It wasn't that Sun didn't want Microsoft using Java, they
| didn't want Microsoft using the JVM any longer, and
| without a license to build their own JVM, J++ wouldn't
| run on any other JVM and wasn't a useful language.
|
| When Microsoft lost their JVM they decided to start from
| scratch, moved the J++ team (including and particularly
| Anders Hejlsberg, C# lead) to a new VM that they could
| control from top to bottom (including its FFI mechanics),
| and much of what had directly been the J++ team used what
| they learned from the whole mess to create C#.
| mmoez wrote:
| Truly mind-boggling!
| leeoniya wrote:
| > This will produce a single EXE file that has whopping 65 MB.
| The produced EXE includes the game, the .NET Runtime, and the
| base class libraries that are the standard part of .NET. You
| might say "still better than Electron" and call it good, but
| let's see if we can do better.
|
| Perhaps a better JS baseline would be QuickJS [0].
|
| Once 1.2MB was reached:
|
| > Now we've reached the end of what's possible with the .NET SDK
| and we need to get our hands dirty. What we're going to do now is
| starting to be ridiculous and I wouldn't expect anyone else to do
| this. We're going to rely on the implementation details of the
| CoreRT compiler and runtime.
|
| QuickJS is 620K.
|
| I guess that doesn't include any kind of facility for rendering
| to the screen (besides basic barfing to stdout) or interacting
| with keyboard/mouse. i wonder how much code would be needed to
| add support for a basic canvas pixeldata api & keyboard event
| handling.
|
| [0] https://bellard.org/quickjs/
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(page generated 2020-01-10 23:00 UTC)