I like to tell people "Deep inside all the Windows NT distributions there's a great OS dying to get out...". REACTOS gives me hope that, someday, there'll be a distribution of an NT-based operating system w/o Win32. (Interix on top of NT w/o Win32 would have been close to what I'd have been interested in seeing...)
> I like to tell people "Deep inside all the Windows NT distributions there's a great OS dying to get out...".
I was a dev in the Windows organization for a few years and this is the conclusion I came to as well. When people complain about development on Windows, they're rarely talking about NT or even Win32. They're usually talking about some layer on top.
Even the example here about spawn() - that function is from the CRT, which honestly is a very crummy and poorly maintained library, but more importantly it isn't really "Windows" and couldn't really be called "the Windows API" - it's just some library that gets new versions alongside releases of Visual Studio. And that spawn() function, ironically enough, mostly exists so that people who know the fork + exec pattern will feel at home.
:) +1 for REACTOS. I am one of those that is looking forward to that one becoming mainstream... They have a GSOC running this year too. I hope they get enough traction to get it in some shape.
