A Microsoft faz de tudo por você

“I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.”

A Microsoft faz de tudo para facilitar os usuários na hora da migração do sistema operacional. :o) Pode parecer brincadeira, mas é o que é. Tanto o que eles fizeram com o SimCity quanto eles fazerem de tudo para facilitar (no modo deles) a migração. E para os que leram o texto por cima: a culpa do bug é dos programadores do SimCity.

O trecho acima foi tirado do texto How Microsoft Lost the API War, do blog do Joel Spolsky’s.

O artigo é sobre a importância (ou a falta dela) da API do Windows e o porque a Microsoft está fornecendo gratuítamente ferramentas de desenvolvimento e compiladores .NET e C++. Web e rich interfaces (hello flashers) também são citados.

“Which means, suddenly, Microsoft’s API doesn’t matter so much. Web applications don’t require Windows.“

Vale a leitura do artigo e de seu blog.