Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 07:30:45 +0200, Terje Mathisen wrote:

The first issue here is that the original API defined the return value
as 32-bit ...

The POSIX effort started in around 1988, and one of its defining
characteristics is the use of symbolic type names like “size_t”, “off_t”
and “time_t”, and not assuming particular sizes for them. Windows NT had
plenty of time to learn from that example; why didn’t it?

Turns out every single Win32-system in existence/in regular use is
little endian ...

Of which there are not many. Wasn’t Windows NT supposed to be some kind of
“portable” OS? Wasn’t it supposed to run on big-endian architectures too,
like POWER, MIPS and SPARC?

Only all those ports failed. In fact, every single non-x86 port of Windows
has failed.

Yeah, not too pretty, but also not a real/important problem.

“Death of a thousand cuts”. And now Microsoft is left scrambling,
desperately trying to turn Windows into Linux.