Windows is the strangest, or hardest, operating system to keep curl support for

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/109432034039353503

by sohkamyung • 4 years ago

176 227 4 years ago

mastodon.social

nells• 4 years ago

Lol, the first answers are by “autinerd” and “ocdtrekkie”. Mastodon is really something else.

nextstep• 4 years ago

those are also their handles on Twitter...

https://twitter.com/autinerd https://twitter.com/ocdtrekkie

I don't get it

intelVISA3• 4 years ago

Perhaps the implication is that it's poor form to publicly announce you understand How Things Work so you should use a more neutral handle like SoyLord66 or DankM3mer - same reason nerdctl is a worse Docker.

pjc506• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ocdtrekkie is also on here and a reasonably prolific poster.

mschuster912• 4 years ago

Mastodon is really something else.

My biggest gripe with Mastodon is just how bad their thread support is. With Twitter, it's easily noticeable which reply belongs to which chain, Mastodon just flattens everything.

jurip• 4 years ago

Depends on the client, I think. Toot! for iOS visualizes threads like this and at least it's pretty clear: https://apps.apple.com/fi/app/toot/id1229021451

superkuh• 4 years ago

My biggest gripe is that it is just like twitter: there's no HTML page with text or images. There's only a javascript application to run. For twitter I could use a nitter mirror. For mastadon... I just close that tab because there's no way to avoid executing the javascript that I'm aware of. Does anyone know of a way?

edit I found a way. You can use the JS api, like:

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/109432034039353503

becomes,

https://mastodon.social/api/v1/statuses/109432034039353503

which returns the post in json form. Readable without execution.

anaisbetts• 4 years ago

"Windows is so bad at being Linux compared to Linux! Why is it so bad at being the same as Linux?"

Well, yeah. I sympathize with @bagder here trying to be cross-platform but Windows is just Different than POSIX, and if you try to write everything for Linux then "compatibility shim" your way to Windows support, you're gonna have a Bad Time

izacus3• 4 years ago

Yeah, I've spent a lot of my career supporting cross-platform software and pretty much all problematic cases were because POSIX fanboys wrote the software and then tried to shim themselves onto macOS and Windows while refusing to rethink their approach.

A lot of issues disappeared when better abstractions were found on top of POSIX.

screamingclay• 4 years ago

macos is posix compliant though

mort963• 4 years ago

POSIX fanbois

That's a weird and derogatory way to talk about people who appreciate having a standard which makes it easier to write cross-platform software.

EDIT: To expand on this comment and make it more productive. You're right. If the goal is to have first-class support for both Windows and POSIX-like platforms, the right approach is to have an understanding of what your software needs to do, what the POSIX APIs make easy, and what the Windows APIs make easy, and build abstractions which make sense based on that. But man, do I appreciate that if first-class Windows support isn't top priority, I can support essentially every other widely used platform in the world (including macOS) by just writing against the POSIX API, and I can even get okay-ish Windows support by using a POSIX compatibility layer on Windows. So my point isn't, "People who want to have first-class Windows support but do so through POSIX compatibility shims are doing it right".

MaPi_• 4 years ago

Curl runs on at least 89 operating systems[0]. Apparently 88 of them are then better at "being Linux" than Windows.

[0]https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/curl-...

reisse2• 4 years ago

How many from that 89 operating systems are either Linux-based (ChromeOS, Android) or real Unices (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, mac)?

Edit: And there are at least 4 Windows flavours in the list!

bogantech2• 4 years ago

From the image: "Operating systems known to have run curl"

How many of them are supported in mainline Curl, aren't POSIX and aren't dead operating systems?

aew4ytasghe52• 4 years ago

Well, then Windows is better at being Windows.

I see Windows, Windows CE, XBox and even MS-DOS on that list.

bmitc5• 4 years ago

The `Invoke-WebRequest` and `Invoke-RestMethod` PowerShell commandlets seem to work fine on Linux.

alkonaut• 4 years ago

Many of them are better at being unix-y because they are Unixes or Unix clones. Apart from Windows, which squares remain if one removes any Unix/linux derivative?

bmitc5• 4 years ago

This is really my main complaint about "Windows sucks" complaints. Nearly universally, something was written for Linux only to be hacked to work, if at all, on Windows while complaining about Windows as if it's supposed to be Linux. Then all the hacks and bugs of the same tool on macOS are ignored because it's a Unix-like, apparently.

Another comment here mentions NT being full of all sorts of quirks. Such sentiments ignore all sorts of quirks with Linux. For some reason, they're ignored or forgot about because people like digging into the internals of esoteric design choices of Unix tools and the Linux OS.

I find myself fairly OS agnostic having spent about equal times on macOS and Windows and a little less on Linux other than as a programming target. In my experience, Windows is the best these days to work on because I get both Linux and Windows on one machine and OS. macOS and Linux all by itself are too much of a compromise as a Linux and as a desktop OS, respectively, for me.

I am currently working on a cross-platform windowing tool with GLFW. Linux and macOS are by far the problem children because of strange limitations in Cocoa/macOS and because Linux has no "built-in" windowing solution.

nikanj• 4 years ago

I've seen the cosmic horror that results from taking a Windows-oriented software and then writing enough headers and glue to make it work on Linux without changes to the main codebase.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th9• 4 years ago

If it's written for linux it can be made to work well with BSD and Mac. Windows is just weird in that respect.

justahuman74• 4 years ago

I'm just surprised windows (non-WSL) is actually supported

intelVISA3• 4 years ago

winsock2 is basically the Berkeley socket API as well, so why wouldn't it be?

sumtechguy• 4 years ago

Having used both. It is close in that the api looks similar. But has a lot of interesting edge cases. Usually around error codes. One thing you learn quickly is win32 != bsd != linux. Each one has their own set of quirks and issues.

tssva2• 4 years ago

Curl has been part of the base install of Windows 10/11 since the December 2017 preview release. Bsdtar was added at the same time.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

Tar, on Windows? What heresy is this. /s

jetbalsa2• 4 years ago

is it /real/ curl? Curl in cmd.exe is real curl, but in powershell that thing gets mapped to Invoke-Webrequest

goranmoomin• 4 years ago

Honesty this just seems that we’ve lost a lot of operating systems except for POSIX and NT. Imagine a libcurl for a SmallTalk machine… or a custom RTOS without any POSIX comapt layer; I’d bet Windows will seem easy compared to one.

In fact, maybe the fact that a Windows port of libcurl can exist at all means that the Windows BSD socket implementation is useful enough to allow these sort of things.

pavlov4• 4 years ago

Symbian was the last weird built-from-scratch OS that shipped a massive amount of units (over 100M in 2010).

In its last years it got a POSIX compatibility layer. Before that it was hard to even use C strings — which I presume was considered a feature by the Symbian API designers, but unfortunately they made their design choices in the mid-1990s using a subset of C++ that didn’t age well at all.

nine_k• 4 years ago

I think QNX still ships in large quantities, just not on devices consumers see as "computers". It has a POSIX layer though.

leoetlino• 4 years ago

FWIW Nintendo's Horizon OS is also built from scratch (and isn't Unix at all), and has also shipped on a massive amount of units (over 110M as of 2022).

(and it happens to have a libcurl port)

aew4ytasghe52• 4 years ago

I mean by your qualifications, Linux in the form of Android "was the last weird built from scratch OS that shipped a massive amount of units".

Also it is not true. A sibling comment mentions Nintendo Switch OS.

api• 4 years ago

After porting ZeroTier to Windows years ago I then had to merge some helpful person’s pull request to remove a lot of profanity that didn’t look professional.

I discovered things about the Windows driver, installer, and networking subsystems and APIs that are best described by pinhead from Hellraiser: “I have such sights to show you.”

No other OS comes close. Definitely not the fruit company one or even commercial Unix (yes Solaris and AIX still live). Most Linux package management is a tire fire but the OS is pretty nice.

I blame backward compatibility coupled with what seems to have been a series of fits of overengineering that now must be carried along as boat anchors.

hwpky• 4 years ago

This might be my favourite comment yet on hn :)

badrabbit3• 4 years ago

This is because a) windows is truly general purpose, anyone from your old grandma to a corporate scientist is the audience b) It is an emergent system, it was pieced together after supporting many features over decades to meet a wide range of needs. In other words, it wasn't architected to meet the needs of a specific subset of users. Like with MacOS it is the graphic designers and consumers that want a simple pc (wasn't alwayd corporate friendly, still isn't compared to windows) and nix, I hardly need to describe that on HN.

You must remember, Windows was at its core made for the PC! Which meant random manufacturers get to shove it on their PC and random devs get to write code on it and it was closed source. This meant a lot of apis and the burden of supporting them long term. It was made in the era whe se purchased software in CDs.

The more I learn the internals of windows (it's a hybrid kernel but I mean the stuff close to the kernel not userspace) the more I am finding our a lot of fascinating design decisions that others can learn from. But even in user space, COM and WMI alone would be amazing to have on nix (I think KDE sort of tries for COM).

But from curl's perspective I can see why he'd be frustrated but I truly wonder what the problems are. If you use openssl and basically the same libs as on *nix, could it be the build systems and runtimes (Visual C++?)?

theta_d2• 4 years ago

Windows was made in the floppy era, not CD era. I still remember picking up my release day copy of windows 95. It was on several floppies.

badrabbit3• 4 years ago

You're right, I just don't have memory going back that far.

qubex• 4 years ago

As a teenager I avidly read some Microsoft book on the impending Windows 95 release (I didn’t have the “Chicago Betas”. I remember reading that book cover to cover. I remember that it depicted checkboxes are rhomboid-shaped, which didn’t actually appear in the final release. I remember my excitement as I queued to get my upgrade edition of Windows 95 that I then installed onto my sluggish 486DX2-66.

I miss those times.

robin_reala• 4 years ago

Where several = 13. I had to install that a good few times.

mgerdts• 4 years ago

When I installed windows 95 soon after release, I had to figure out how to dial boot it with my SLS or Slackware installation which was installed from floppies.

dboreham3• 4 years ago

Present day Windows is NT, which wasn't made in the floppy era (floppies existed but were not practically useful by the time NT 3.1 was released).

kevin_thibedeau2• 4 years ago

I had an NT4 machine at work until 2007 that only had a floppy drive for writable media. It had USB 1 ports but those were unusable in NT which was why $employer kept running it.

csmpltn3• 4 years ago

"Windows is the strangest, or hardest, operating system to keep curl support for"

Opening a socket and issuing a GET call is somehow too difficult on Windows?

Will you entertain the possibility that CURL's architecture is to blame?

dsr_• 4 years ago

If all curl did was "opening a socket and issuing a GET" it would be about a hundred lines long, including input validation and two kinds of errors.

It does a lot more than that, because the Internet isn't actually that simple. You should look at the first paragraph of https://curl.se rather than have me rehash it here.

csmpltn3• 4 years ago

CURL supports plenty of protocols, but at the end of the day they're all application-layer and should've easily been written as platform-agnostic business logic. If CURL was architected properly, keeping any OS-specific code behind platform-agnostic interfaces - porting it across operating systems should not have been an issue.

When the codebase depends on POSIX and platform-specific quirks everywhere, putting the blame on the operating system when it's time to port things is hilarious.

I don't see posts like this from the people who had to port Portal 2 to run natively on Linux, as an example. If Portal 2 (a codebase you can safely assume is 1000x more complex) made it fine without the drama, there's no reason CURL can't follow suit (unless the architecture is botched).

magicalhippo2• 4 years ago

As a primarily dev who grew up on Windows and has just used curl for some basic stuff, wonder what's so hard. That is, on the face of it, curl seems like a quite basic application in the grand scheme of things. Would have been nice with some specific, juicy details.

I've worked on a medium sized open-source project (~500kLOC) that was supported on Windows, Linux and MacOS, so I'm not unfamilar with cross-platform support. For us, MacOS was by far the weirdest of the bunch.

One of the complaints was the path separators. We solved that by just consistently using / everywhere internal. Any supplied paths would get converted right away. Not really an issue to write home about IMHO.

elzbardico6• 4 years ago

Not to mention that this can also be easily remedied with a macro or even a constant and an IFDEF

user3939382• 4 years ago

curl seems like a quite basic application

It's an HTTP client. Here's 1 of 7 HTTP RFCs https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230

There are bigger specs like for wifi where it's thousands of pages, but I don't think you can classify a client that implements even half of the HTTP specs as basic.

phendrenad24• 4 years ago

In other words, curl attempts to fully implement the RFCs, which have many, many edge cases and weird features, so a seemingly simple application balloons into a massive undertaking.

theandrewbailey2• 4 years ago

curl is way more than HTTP.

curl supports about 26 protocols. We say "about" because it depends on how you count and what you consider to be distinctly different protocols.

https://everything.curl.dev/protocols/curl

magicalhippo2• 4 years ago

It's an HTTP client.

Yeah that's what I mean, on the face of it there's not all that much platform specific code should be required for that.

Sure handling all the edge cases of HTTP and whatnot isn't trivial, but almost all of that should be platform neutral so not relevant for this discussion.

Now granted I know HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are different beasts. But that's why I said it would have been nice with some concrete examples. It's always interesting to learn about issues and pitfalls you've never considered, or similar.

simula67• 4 years ago

What is the best way to learn to write programs for Windows? For example, let's say 'I want to disable taskbar tab grouping programmatically', how would I know where to look?

elzbardico6• 4 years ago

Windows Internals by Mark Russinovich. It is the bible of windows development.

pionar• 4 years ago

Can't upvote this enough. This really is the answer.

Aachen• 4 years ago

That doesn't sound like a program so much as a registry key

lzooz2• 4 years ago

That's a user setting, if you change that from your program Raymond will get mad at you.

But yes, it's a registry key. It will be a bit hard to make explorer.exe reread that registry key without restarting it, though, since it probably reads the key on startup and caches it.

delta_p_delta_x• 4 years ago

What is the best way to learn to write programs for Windows?

There are many ways to program Windows.

If you want C or C++, you can use Win32[0] and COM[1]. Of course, the C and C++ standard libraries are also available, within ucrt.dll[2]. Not to mention additional libraries/frameworks like Direct3D, OpenGL, DirectSound, etc.

For .NET, there's several options:

  - Windows Forms[3]
  - Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)[4]
  - WinUI 3[5] (most recent, but lacking some features)

Windows' command-line shell of choice is PowerShell[6], written in C#. There are two flavours, Windows PowerShell 5.1 (Windows-only, uses .NET Framework 4.8), and PowerShell Core (cross-platform, uses .NET 6+).

For example, let's say 'I want to disable taskbar tab grouping programmatically', how would I know where to look?

There are registry keys and GPO policies[7] (you can use any of the above C/C++/C# APIs to read/write from the registry, but your program will need the appropriate permissions)> However, Windows really is best configured with the GUI (Settings app -> Personalisation -> Taskbar).

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/com/componen...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/upgrade-your-c...

[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/ov...

[4] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/overvie...

[5] https://microsoft.github.io/microsoft-ui-xaml/

[6] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/

[7] https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f08bc6bb-a...

mike_hearn4• 4 years ago

Actually, Windows development has moved on since the Win32/.NET days.

A "modern" Windows app can use WinRT, which is a reasonably clean OOP API, from multiple languages including C++. The API is based around coroutines and async/await for concurrency and you can do a lot without ever touching Win32, e.g. there are HTTP clients, file APIs etc all of which are not Win32 and also don't require .NET. Under the hood it's all COM based stuff but you aren't really exposed to that.

Example of what it looks like:

https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-appsample-photo-editor/...

pjc506• 4 years ago

The quickest "I want to write an application" is probably C#, and then good old Windows Forms on top of that for UI. (Many more modern options exist with various drawbacks).

C# has an excellent system for native interop ("P/Invoke") if you need to write a program that calls a couple of native functions that aren't available as nuget packages.

disable taskbar tab grouping programmatically

.. fiddling with windows settings, on the other hand, is kind of a nightmare. Either you identify the registry key or you have to go hunting in an endless maze of APIs.

elzbardico6• 4 years ago

NT is different from Unix, it is heavily inspired by VMS, which was the anti-Unix of its time. The basic architectural metaphors are different, and the way you think about things is different. It is more architectured and more opinionated, which may look like over-engineering for some and a superbly coherent design for others. There are some pain points, of course, a lot of them related to the need to support code written for a completely different OS (MS-DOS + Windows non-nt), but overall, I think that the general architecture of NT is pretty neat, and I would dare say, beautiful in some places.

AdamN• 4 years ago

This is really the New Jersey approach vs the MIT approach:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

ilyt2• 4 years ago

It appears that author does not like HN as this redirects to https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png

Is that the same wanker that got in a hissy fit over distros including xscreensaver ?

teddyh• 4 years ago

Better link (from the actual author of the text, and without referrer tricks for links from HN): https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

galangalalgol2• 4 years ago

One thing I have trouble with in windows is debugging problems. If say I plug in a usb device and nothing happens, I know what logs to look at, and they are verbose and if I don't, I can search the internet and find five or six possible solutions depending on distro and age. In windows the search generally says "download this malware and it will solve your problem", "restore to a save point" or "grab your install media and start over". I would be surprised if there is a good way to do the same things, they just aren't discoverable. When the device manager and services.msc show all is well, but it clearly isn't, there doesn't seem to be much advice out there.

Edit: I liked vms fine, I don't think this is inheritance from that, or even dos. I knew how to debug in dos, using debug.com even. I think it has something to do with the lack of expectations for a user to be able to debug a problem. Osx has abit of this, but sitting on a bsd saves it to some extent.

ethbr03• 4 years ago

It's absolutely a problem. Aka the sysinternals / Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich problem.

To wit, Windows has plenty of debugging functionality. Historically not as extensive as Unix, but it was there.

However, 0% of that was exposed in any sane way, because Microsoft...? Actually, I have no idea why it wasn't. For the price of 2 senior engineers and a willingness to actually release tools, Microsoft could have drastically improved the situation.

Instead they just (eventually) bought sysinternals. :(

boris• 4 years ago

superbly coherent design [...] NT is pretty neat, and I would dare say, beautiful in some places

Practically, though, it's a shit show. My "favorite" is the inability to delete a file that is open by another process. Combine this with Windows Defender that scans every file that your application creates, and now you have no reliable way of deleting or moving your files.

As someone who works on a C/C++ build toolchain and has to deal with Windows design decisions every day, I can tell you without any hesitation there is nothing coherent or beautiful about it. I don't think even Microsoft believes this.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 4 years ago

My "favorite" is the inability to delete a file that is open by another process.

What does the alternative look like?

Lets say a process has a file open. Lets say it is a really big one, like 200GB. Ok, so our disk is nearly out of space, better delete this 200GB file, problem solved right?

Only not. Because now even though the file looks deleted, the process still has it open and that space is still allocated to it.

So either you're hiding reality from the user, or you're preventing them from deleting a file that is in use. Windows went one way and UNIX went another.

32311• 4 years ago

My "favorite" is the inability to delete a file that is open by another process

Because of this Linux "feature" I experienced data loss - I zipped a file and deleted it, but the process which created it was still writing to it. But all the data that it wrote now ended up in the void since the file didn't exist anymore. And there was no error/warning that the process was writing to a non-linked file, so I discovered the data loss much later.

elzbardico6• 4 years ago

First is a design decision. The second can be easily solved by configuring the appropriate exclusions on Windows Defender.

herio• 4 years ago

Practically, though, it's a shit show.

I usually put it as "Deep inside windows is a really beautiful OS just screaming to be let out from under all that junk on top."

The NT kernel isn't that bad, different from unix for sure but still good. It then just keeps getting progressively worse as you go upwards in the stack from there.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th9• 4 years ago

I think that file locking was a decision made with good intentions, but it's probably one of the single biggest mistakes in the windows ecosystem.

And I understand people will argue for it because it does have some utility, but not near enough to pay for the all the damage it's done to people's time.

maldev3• 4 years ago

This is by design though, if another process has a lock on a file, they don't want you to delete it, since it could break another process. They actually do allow it if the applications open it with the createfile flag FILE_SHARE_DELETE. Or you can do it as a transacted operation, which will delete the file "eventually". Again, it's by design, you have to be explicit if you want someone to delete a file you're using, which is honestly a better design than having it be the default with the option of locking the file like Linux does.

If you really want to close it and know you could break another process but don't care(Which you should), you can use NtQueryFileInformation to get the process ID's that have the file opened, then use OpenProcess with the PID, then use NtQueryProcessInformation to get the open handles. Call DuplicateHandle on each of the handles. Then use NtQueryObject on each of them to get the name of the file, then close it.

smileybarry4• 4 years ago

Combine this with Windows Defender that scans every file that your application creates, and now you have no reliable way of deleting or moving your files.

This doesn't happen for years now due to "opportunistic locks" -- when you open a file being used by an app which support oplocks (i.e.: usually antiviruses), they get a blocking notification and can release the file. They can hold the notification (and stall the requesting application) until they're done, close their handle, and the other app's open succeeds.

dboreham3• 4 years ago

inability to delete a file that is open by another process

otoh if you have never encountered Unix, you might be surprised that it's even possible to delete a file currently open by another process.

cshokie2• 4 years ago

Windows has the concept of OpLocks on files, which open the file but can be broken by other access. When used properly that should prevent antivirus from ever preventing file deletion. The deletion would break the lock that antivirus has open.

phendrenad24• 4 years ago

Practically, though
someone who works on a C/C++ build toolchain

Pick one. No seriously, tradeoffs have to be made, and I don't think "people who work on build automation" are the intended main use case for Windows Home Edition.

yamtaddle• 4 years ago

I recently discovered that Linux handles processes holding files open a little differently from FreeBSD, too, when I tried to unmount a ZFS volume. Something had ahold of a file on it, so I couldn't unmount it—on FreeBSD you can just say "I want all programs that are preventing this to fuck off and, if they're so inclined, to crash"—and ZFS provides a flag to do just that—and go on with your day, but Linux evidently won't let you (I ended up on some ZFS mailing list archive to confirm this was the case and I wasn't just holding it wrong). You have to go track the process(es) down and kill it(/them) yourself, not unlike how you can't delete a file that's in use on Windows and have to go kill the processes. It was faster to just reboot the damn machine than to do that (a very Windows solution).

[EDIT] It may have been a ZFS export operation, not exactly an unmount? I can't recall for sure. Point is, Linux made you go find and kill the relevant processes yourself, while FreeBSD made it trivial to override that and do what you needed to do with no further fuss.

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

NT upto 4 was beautiful when it was released in my opinion. It was a "serious" "workstation" operating system. Supporting multiple platforms.

The ability to run different "operating systems" was neat. The graphics stack was all in user space.

The biggest hope was a selling WindowsNT with Alpha CPUs to the Defense department if memory serves. (Which is why the POSIX parts were added) That never happened.

NT4 was not made to be the best OS for games.

After that Microsoft has cut a lot of neat parts out and bastardized the clean separation between the kernels and user space in order to make the OS faster.

I wish they had branched it "Windows Home" and "Windows Workstation"

It would be a lot of work I guess. They do have Windows Service but I think that it has undergone the same changes.

jstarks• 4 years ago

NT4 already had the graphics stack in kernel mode.

indrora2• 4 years ago

They tried that.

It was called Windows Me.

Also, the selling point of the Professional editions was and continues to be use in Active Directory and business environments, not developer workstations.

adzm2• 4 years ago

IO completion ports (IOCP) was such a brilliant design, and still holds up today. It's fascinating how long it took for similar paradigms to become more dominant elsewhere eg with kqueue

dboreham3• 4 years ago

See another recent thread for my theory (based on what I heard from various Unix vendors at the time) that this was mostly due to fear of MS patent litigation. iirc AIX did have an IOCP-like feature. MS acquired the rights to DEC's patents in this space, handy since IOCP is similar to VMS's QIO.

halpmeh2• 4 years ago

A lot of comments here aren’t acknowledging the actual complaint, which is:

everything from path separators, stupid shells, charsets, to not excepting non-sockets in select, no std libc, ownershipd of memory passed to DLLs, ...

Not having a standard-compliant libc seems really annoying. Also, curl is an IO heavy library. Not having select work as it does on other platforms or not having libc work as expected is going to be really annoying.

cesarb3• 4 years ago

Not having a standard-compliant libc seems really annoying. Also, curl is an IO heavy library.

Emphasis on library, curl is not just a command line tool. Calling a library compiled with one version of libc (actually msvcrXX.dll) from a program or library compiled with a different version of libc (for instance, msvcr71.dll vs msvcr81.dll) means things like file descriptors (not just FILE structs, but also numeric file descriptors) aren't shared between them.

Joker_vD3• 4 years ago

Yes, and if you link against something compiled with cc3290.dll (or whatever Borland's C runtime was called) you too will have bad time unless you structure your library with explicit understanding that there may be any number of C runtimes inside one process, including zero. Expose CreateX()/FreeX() from your library or arrange that the process would on start up pass to your library a table of allocation/deallocation functions to use and use those.

kuroguro• 4 years ago

Eh, just link everything against the "old" "unsupported" msvcrt.dll that comes with the system and Bob's your uncle! /s

Joker_vD3• 4 years ago

Not having a standard-compliant libc seems really annoying

There are several standard-compliant libc implementations (and C implementations in general) available on Windows, pick any one that you fancy. And why should an OS even ship a default runtime for some random programming language anyhow? Just because it was written in that programming language so it gets a preferential treatment? That's breaking the abstraction layering.

ilyt2• 4 years ago

It already ships default runtimes... talk about something you know maybe ?

mrpippy• 4 years ago

If you want to allow people to build curl using various different compilers (and old versions of them) on Windows, it needs to support all their libc’s.

And at runtime, libcurl could find itself using a different libc from the application, so a buffer malloc’d in libc can’t be passed to free() by the app.

pjc506• 4 years ago

The path separator should just be fixed. Almost all the APIs accept '/', it's just that the old "cmd" utilities don't because they use / as the option separator (from CP/M), not "-".

That would probably require killing CMD, which would be a big compatibility break. I suspect it could be turned into a shim layer for corporates who need to keep running BAT files.

Not accepting non-sockets in select() .. the native API (WaitForMultipleObjects) is much more flexible, but it doesn't look like select().

libc: require the user to install vcrt like everyone else. Microsoft have actually kind of fixed this with the "universal" runtime: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/universal-crt-... but only recently.

halpmeh2• 4 years ago

No one is saying that it's impossible to develop curl for Windows. Needing to either work around a non-standard libc, require the user install a standard compliant libc, or ship your own libc with custom methods like FreeX is strange and hard compared to other operating systems. Same with using something like WaitForMultipleObjects vs select and path separators.

If you're a Windows-first developer, you're probably used to these things, but to non-Windows developers, Windows is strange and annoying.

I tried to port one of our server applications to Windows. I eventually gave up because our service would remove files that were still open. To me, it's crazy that Windows doesn't allow you to do that. This also means you can't use a tool like SSH or SCP. If you accidentally kill the local SCP process while the file is transferring, you need to remotely connect to the destination and kill the remote SCP process to allow that file to be modified again.

cesarb3• 4 years ago

Almost all the APIs accept '/'

Except the APIs you need to use to avoid the 260-character MAX_PATH limit (without depending on both an obscure group policy setting and a setting on the application manifest, and keep in mind that curl is also a library so it cannot control the application manifest). AFAIK, the "\\?\" trick to extend the limit to 32767 characters requires both absolute paths and the use of a backslash (\) as the path separator.

sidlls• 4 years ago

At one point when I was in academia I had to write drivers for Windows to control some scientific equipment for our experiments. I remember it being a damn nightmare compared to even the VAX we had (which, granted, was basically just a toy we had in the lab, and didn't do much serious with).

adzm2• 4 years ago

One of the most frustrating thing with Windows is the UTF16/UCS2/etc wide chars needed everywhere with their APIs. UTF8 is so much nicer to deal with in almost every situation. Things are starting to get better on that end but it's still behind compatibility flags that third party libraries may not handle properly anyway. It's probably a minor annoyance, but seems entirely unnecessary now that you may need more than one wchar to encode a character anyway.

jetbalsa2• 4 years ago

I bet that came down as strings coming from the filesystem, or user for that matter might be in a language that requires UTF16 to properly be used.

pjc506• 4 years ago

It came about because Microsoft deployed what they called "unicode" before UTF-8 was standardized. In Microsoft-land "Unicode" means UTF-16. This isn't great but it's also baked into all the APIs.

account42• 4 years ago

They could always use WTF-8 for the filesystem APIs which can encode all WTF-16 strings (i.e. the encoding that Windows actually uses).

cshokie2• 4 years ago

In a lot of ways Windows predates that being an option. This blog post has more of the history on that: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10...

yuuta• 4 years ago

NT and Unix are completely different OS. You cannot develop Windows programs the Unix way, and vice versa.

rkagerer• 4 years ago

Is this just a rant or did I miss further content that gives examples of the "many custom, special, weird and quirky ways that require special-case solutions in the code"? As a long time Windows developer I know of several, but am genuinely interested in hearing about more from the perspective of someone who's been "in the trenches" of several OS's. eg:

- What does Windows get right?

- What's it get miserably wrong?

- Is the trouble that all the other OS's are more POSIX-like and this is the odd one out?

Windows is the strangest, or hardest, operating system to keep curl support for

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