Reading through the discussion of Windows Cloud (also known as Windows 10 Cloud), the newly leaked future-future version of Windows, it struck me that many of you don’t know the difference between the Win32 API and the WinRT API – or even what an “API” is, and why it should matter if all you want to do is use, you know, a computer.
Here’s a short primer.
About a year ago I wrote about the Win32 application programming interface, WinRT, and how the two are shaking now. The short version:
Old-fashioned Windows programs — the ones you likely use every day, such as Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office — rely on the Win32 Application Programming Interface, the set of system calls that lets programs talk to the operating system. Charles Petzold wrote the first widely used book about the Win32 API in 1988. The Win32 API grew and morphed, reaching its pinnacle in Windows 7.
When Microsoft announced Windows 8, it also announced the new Windows Runtime, a set of APIs (commonly called WinRT) that truly revolutionized Windows programming. The “Metro” apps you may recall from Windows 8 and 8.1 are based on WinRT. I’ll gently sidestep the discussion of how Microsoft inexplicably built computers that would only run WinRT and instead move on to mobile.
WinRT was the great rallying cry for mobile computing — the nexus, at the time, of the mobile-first Windows world. It has all sorts of mobile-friendly capabilities, but relatively few developers have chosen to use it…
With Windows 10, Microsoft announced (and repeatedly renamed) its new Universal Windows Platform. UWP incorporates WinRT but goes beyond… Thus WinRT got swallowed up by UWP — and a whole bunch of other stuff was thrown in to fill out UWP… All of the UWP programs are destined for the Windows Store — at least that’s what we’re supposed to expect.
Based on the leaked (and most assuredly not released) Windows Cloud version that’s making the rounds, it’s clear that Windows Cloud will only run programs from the Windows Store. But it isn’t clear if WinCloud will run Win32 apps in the Windows Store. If it only runs WinRT apps from the Windows Store, then we have a regurgitation (perhaps an advanced regurgitation) of Windows RT, the ill-fated version of Windows that isn’t really Windows.
Given the current state of the Windows Store, it’s hard to imagine any near-term use for an operating system that’s tied inextricably to the Windows Store – particularly if it’s exclusively tied to “Universal” (formerly Metro) apps in the Windows Store.
