Rust hello world app for Windows 95, cross-compiled from Linux, no MSVC

https://hails.org/@hailey/110360791283096989

by sohkamyung • 3 years ago

168 105 3 years ago

garganzol3• 3 years ago

I just can't help but point out how cool the Windows 95 user interface was. Partially inspired by the NeXT OS, its clarity endlessly resonates with me.

rafabulsing• 3 years ago

This is something that I've wondered about before. I've seen many people with that opinion: UIs in the past, although dated looking now, were very intuitive, in that every interactive thing looked interactive.

Contrast that with amorphous, flat, "clean" designs we have today.

So what could we do to have something that looks nice and modern, but is also intuitive, with clear affordances?

zac23or4• 3 years ago

I've been in development for 24 years and now I have issues with some very strange UIs. Where do I click to post?

Old UIs are consistent. Buttons are buttons, labels are labels, and so on.

New UIs are inconsistent. In the facebook interface, the post button is not a button, it's a label. It may have changed since I last used it. It also occurs in native programs.

In older UIs, button size makes sense. Today every app recreates the buttons, with absurd sizes.

Contrast. Designers love low contrast in the new UIs. Here in HN it is sometimes very difficult to read the text.

As a developer, I participated in several meetings about new UIs. "Beauty" is the keyword. The beauty seems to be in the rounded corners and the use of labels instead of buttons. Yes, I created a bunch of shitty UIs.

But most importantly, dark patterns don't exist in old UIs. Dark patterns are the worst thing about the new UIs.

badsectoracula5• 3 years ago

in that every interactive thing looked interactive

I agree in general though i'm not sure Win95 was that consistent. Buttons did look 3D but menus - also interactive - did not. Similarly with the context menu icon at the top left, it was interactive but didn't look like it. Meanwhile Win98 had toolbar buttons become flat.

There was an attempt with Win3.0 (i think) to define a form-follows-function approach where "if something can be interacted with it should be 3D" but even that didn't went far (checkboxes were not 3D nor were edit boxes). By late Win3.1 the ctl3d (i think) DLL was introduced to make everything look 3D regardless of function.

In comparison to today, sure things were better, but it isn't like there was any point in time where things were consistent in terms of control/widget look following its function.

forgotmypw17• 3 years ago

Windows 95 was developed over several years with a lot of research and user studies. The primary objective of all this work was so that a person without prior exposure to computers could figure out how to use it. The software was designed to help the user accomplish the tasks they have set out to do before sitting down at the computer.

With most modern mainstream interfaces, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of their quality. And the design objectives for many interfaces have changed to manipulating the users to do what the developer wants them to do, with the user's tasks relegated to a side quest.

Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. A lot of attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not push an update a week after release to patch a bug. At the same time, Microsoft was offering real live person phone support for its products, so every UI flaw cost them a lot in support costs.

Also, one of the design requirements was to fully support only-keyboard operation, and a lot of QA effort went into ensuring this was true. This meant that every UI element had to have a keyboard cue. This duplication of accessibility resulted in a UI which was much more thoroughly evaluated for its efficiency.

Finally, I think there was a different culture around design. I think a higher portion of people in the UI field were there for personal and passion reasons, and would have been embarrassed to have anything to do with the type of blundering buffoon of an interface that is common in today's computing.

layer82• 3 years ago

I’m sure there are many ways to do a restyling, similar to the Apple Aqua UI [0] for example, that could create a fresh look, while maintaining the clear affordances.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

The issue, I suspect, is that the young UI graphic designers working at Microsoft today mostly didn’t grow up using PCs and therefore don’t really know what their missing.

FeistySkink7• 3 years ago

A full-blown OS with an office suite fit on something like 100MB drive with everything opening and responding to user input in a snappy manner. And it didn't show random ads or try to track your every action. You could chose when and if to install any updates. All the while running on a 486 with a few megs of RAM. How did we get to the current state of software?

Edit: I remember a few places still running 3.11 well into the 00s because it just worked for the given tasks, got out of the way and didn't require a super-computer to run. The performance difference was especially jarring when Vista came out and barely worked on contemporary hardware.

photonbeam• 3 years ago

Snappy is not what my memory of the IO on those machines was

bitwize2• 3 years ago

A 486 with a few megs of RAM coukd not run Windows 95 in a snappy manner. It would swap like bugfuck. To do Windows 95 usably, you probably need 8 MiB minimum, 12 or 16 MiB ideally.

Windows 3.x you could get away with 4 MiB. And that and Office 1.0 could fit in 100 MiB. Even then, we complained about it.

reisse3• 3 years ago

How did we get to the current state of software?

Though playing mp3 was a heavy task consuming most of the CPU. It was hard to do anything while listening to music.

Or think about how pressing Ctrl-S once a minute became a reflex, because MS Office crashed so often.

Hell, anyone remembers how unstable Windows ME was? Or how desktop Linuxes were practically non-existent?

Current state of software is _amazing_ compared to what was available at that time.

moonchrome3• 3 years ago

How did we get to the current state of software?

You mean how did we get to a point where :

- I don't have to mash Ctrl+s because software crashers constantly

- segfaults are not a daily occurrence

- any random executable can't crash the OS (hell modern windows can survive a GPU driver crash)

- I can use the internet relatively safely

- I don't need to restart my device after every install

etc. ?

quotemstr• 3 years ago

Hot take: developers today are nowhere near as talented as those of 1995. Every single dev in 1995 was the equal of a principal SDE today. You had to be, because unless your code met that bar, it just didn't work.

There were no guardrails. There was no borrow checker. There was no ASAN. There was no valgrind. Christ, you barely had a debugger. You couldn't copy and paste answers from ChatGPT or Stack Overflow: you either RTFM and comprehended it, or your code didn't work at all.

Today, we spend an enormous amount of compute, memory, and latency compensating for the modal developer being unable to do safe memory management or concurrency.

wrp• 3 years ago

Windows 95/98 had a lot of problems due to its DOS legacy. A better focus for discussion of what was possible at the time would be BeOS or QNX.

usernew• 3 years ago

We got to the current state because you left out most of what the OS does now. That's like comparing a 787 to a Cessna, and stating "airplanes used to be light and easy on fuel - how did we get to the current state of the airplane?

I have a work account that I can use to log into all my devices. All my docs and even the stuff on my desktop is magically synced and backed up, and I even have versions. I can open a visio on my laptop in the kitchen, draw some stuff while I wait for the coffee, then go sit on my desk and keep working on that file. When I go for a refill, it's still open in the kitchen and I keep working. Yes - one document, open at the same time on 2 machines, changes being synced live on the screen w/o closing.

When I change my preferences to not select the entire word at a time, it magically saves in every outlook install on all my machines. Plug something in and the driver for it is magically downloaded and installed. Have disk? Remember that? Different sizes and shapes and density monitors? Monitors - many of them.

Gramma can use the computer now - you don't need a geek. Yes, the gramma interface is annoying for the tech user, but the tech user can easily put in a new window manager or tweak registry - the new dumbed down default opened computers to everyone - not just geeks. Tracking? Hmm, don't see any. Maybe because you can (a) turn it off, and (b) you can install a version w/o it. Yes, if you install the consumer version of Windows made for gramma, it will track everything. That's because it's for gramma, and tracking helps make the next version easier for gramma.

You also don't want gramma to be able to turn off updates, because she will. Updates on my machine? They were set to download and notify - never install, by default. But no, you don't get that on the gramma home version.

Do you ever get into a cessna and complain they don't have room for all the 40 members of your group? That's not a valid complaint. That's a bad choice of right tool for the job.

The OS is big because the 787 is big. And I say all that, as someone who hates MS and Windows with a deep, long, hard, smelly brown passion.

statquontrarian• 3 years ago

Currently running Chicago95 on Linux! https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

airstrike• 3 years ago

Not to mention those beautiful tiling wallpapers. I'm partial to the simplicity of the blue rivets, though it may just be nostalgia...

https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Windows_95

codegeek• 3 years ago

Windows 95 and 98 are one of the best things that I have ever come across when it comes to Software.

tmountain• 3 years ago

What about the regular crashes that always happened at the absolute worst time possible? For me, Windows 2000 was a godsend from a stability perspective. I ran it until it was truly no longer viable.

allochthon• 3 years ago

As someone who used Windows 95 when it came out, it struck me at the time as an off-brand Macintosh, making it feel kind of cheap (a feeling that never went away). I had also been using X Windows by way of SGI's workstations around that time, and IRIX felt clean, if a little old-school, by contrast.

asveikau2• 3 years ago

95 felt amazing if you were used to 3.1. I had some exposure to Mac then and I liked it a lot, but somehow I always saw it as a different thing, rather than Windows being a knockoff. (Obviously there was a lot knocked off. It was really funny to me that they introduced a "recycle bin" to copy the Mac "trash".)

qalmakka2• 3 years ago

Windows 2000 was the pinnacle of Windows UX, change my mind.

tmtvl• 3 years ago

Why would I change your mind when you speak the truth?

I do wonder what the Apple equivalent to Windows 2000 would be, maybe Mac OS 8?

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

I swear. The first thing which came to my mind too. So clear. So precise. Why did we take a worse turn here seriously? Is there any research on this?

tssva• 3 years ago

The Windows interfaces peaked with Windows 2000 which is similar to Windows 95. It has been downhill since.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

No MSVC involvement whatsoever
all I had to do was extract a bunch of headers and link libraries from the Visual C++ 6 SDK

Hmm . . .

rektide• 3 years ago

I wonder whether it's actually legal to extract & independently redistribute these libraries. https://github.com/haileys/vc6-sys/tree/main/sdk/lib

garganzol3• 3 years ago

Those files just reflect the publicly available Windows SDK, so it is pretty much ok to extract them - they reflect just a public domain knowledge. Actually, you can even create your own libraries with special tools like IMPLIB.

Animats2• 3 years ago

It's quite possible to develop in Rust for Windows without using Windows.

Try my open source "ui-mock".[1] This is a test of the cross-platform stack. Just get the repository with "git clone", and make sure you have Rust installed for target "x86_64-pc-windows-gnu". See the Cargo.toml file for build instructions.

This is a game-type user interface. It's just some menus and a 3D cube. It doesn't do much, but it exercises all the lower levels. This allows debugging cross-platform problems in a simple environment. The main crates used are winit (cross-plaform window event handling), wgpu (cross-plaform GPU handling), rfd (cross-platform file dialogs), keychain (cross-platform password storage), egui (Rust-native menus and dialogs), and rend3 (safe interface to wgpu). For graphics, it uses Vulkan, so it will run on Windows back to the last release of Windows 7. Not Windows 95, though; it's 64-bit. It will also run under Wine, so you don't even need a Windows system to test.

My metaverse client uses the same stack. It's compiled on Linux, and runs on both Linux and Windows. So I'm building a high-performance 3D graphics program for Windows without even owning a Windows system or using any Microsoft software.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

junon2• 3 years ago

I compile BGFX + SDL2 for use alongside Rust on WSL without using MSVC and can run the generated .exe directly from the command line. Works fine - the package management is a bit of a pain but not terrible (two commands to install dependencies instead of just `cargo build`), but overall it has worked absolutely perfectly.

Animats2• 3 years ago

Those are more mainstream solutions than what I'm doing. I'm working to beat C++ OpenGL game performance. Most applications don't need to do that. And they don't need to idle at 100% of one CPU, redrawing every frame, as games do.

Good old gtk is available cross-platform for Rust. If you're not doing a graphics intense program, that can be a good choice.

qalmakka2• 3 years ago

With xwin you can download a copy of the MSVC sysroot and use it to build Windows applications on Linux. LLVM reimplemented the entire MSVC toolchain and can thus link with MSVC libraries.

kragen7• 3 years ago

if you're interested in cross-compiling win32 programs from linux without msvc you might be interested in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/w32dry/

i wrote this 15 years ago but it still works on this recent ubuntu system if you supply a couple of variables to make

    make run CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc WINE=wine

no rust tho

in debian/ubuntu the package to install to get i686-w64-mingw32-gcc and the attendant header files and libraries is gcc-mingw-w64-i686

amusingly the executables i built 15 years ago still run on current gnu/linux; not sure if that would be true for things linked with libx11 and libxext, certainly not libgtk

csdvrx2• 3 years ago

Wow, fantastic!

amusingly the executables i built 15 years ago still run on current gnu/linux; not sure if that would be true for things linked with libx11 and libxext, certainly not libgtk

win32 is how you write software you want to run forever thanks to the large user base.

I'm hoping for a wine cosmopolitan binary that would render to sixels: that would run on about everything, with qemu ensuring it keeps working if/when arm64 or mips64 take over amd64

kragen7• 3 years ago

glad you enjoy it!

sixel is not very widely supported, and the baud rate of a vt340+ is not really adequate for a gui

mhd• 3 years ago

I'm assuming cross-compiled from a way more modern computer. Or could a Pentium I complete a Rust run?

estebank• 3 years ago

I would guess that the first problem you'd encounter is getting LLVM to work on that Pentium I.

3836293648• 3 years ago

IIRC you can run rustc on ancient hardware if you compile it yourself. You can't however, compile the compiler on 32 bit hardware due to the 4GB RAM limit

Dwedit• 3 years ago

The problem with Windows 9x is the 'ANSI' APIs everywhere, and no support for Unicode.

Oddly enough, we are actually going backwards from using the UTF-16 APIs back to using 'ANSI' APIs, and simultaneously setting the process code page to UTF-8. Any time you use ANSI APIs, there is a hidden conversion step (allocation, conversion, copying) where your text is converted into UTF-16.

josephcsible• 3 years ago

The problem with Windows 9x is the 'ANSI' APIs everywhere, and no support for Unicode.

Didn't you just need to install https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Layer_for_Unicode aka UNICOWS.DLL to fix that?

weinzierl• 3 years ago

Rust officially supports kernel >= 3.2, which is admittedly old enough to cover any real world usage scenario. That being said I wonder if someone tried to get a Rust program (or even better the compiler and toolchain) to run on an old 90s Slackware or something? That'd be an article I'd love to read.

ryao• 3 years ago

The title begs the question, how do you compile Rust with MSVC?

jamesmunns• 3 years ago

MSVC is the default compiler backend for Rust on windows. You can also switch to use GCC tho: https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/installation/windows.html

ben-schaaf• 3 years ago

Unless you're using one of the gcc rust compiler reimplementations it only ever uses LLVM. MSVC can't compile rust, and the rust compiler can't use MSVC to compile things. What rust & LLVM support is various ABIs on windows, meaning your rust code can link windows libraries (and the other way around).

seritools• 3 years ago

Depending on how far you want to go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273

juliangoldsmith• 3 years ago

I wrote part of a Markdown editor in Rust, with the intention of bringing it to Windows 95. I have a lot of newer work I need to bring in, but the old version can be found here: https://github.com/julian-goldsmith/rustpad

It should build fine as-is for plain i586-mingw, but W95 requires a custom toolchain with a modified core crate.

Rust hello world app for Windows 95, cross-compiled from Linux, no MSVC

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