[audunw]

The reason apps from Win 9x runs on Windows 11 is that MS puts a ton of effort into explicitly supporting old apps. For popular apps that includes supporting undocumented APIs and even app-specific bug compatibility.

Putting it on app developers to account for infinite forward compatibility is not at all reasonable.

The best outcome would be if many Zig apps become popular enough that Windows is forced to maintain backward compatibility for ntdll. The API is clearly superior to win32 as many other developers have discovered and discussed before. It’d be nice to force MS to take low lever programming seriously instead of chasing AI slop.

[lostmsu]

> The reason apps from Win 9x runs on Windows 11 is that MS puts a ton of effort into explicitly supporting old apps.

No, that's one of the reasons. The other one is that public kernel32 -> private ntdll design works.