Quite honestly I admit that I really love the Posix-APIs for system programming and even some Linux specific extensions to it. I/O, Locking, Semaphores, Shared Memory, Message Queues, Signals, named and anonymous pipes, Unix Domain Sockets, TCP/IP programming, Terminal I/O, pthreads and a lot more are very powerful and fun to program. I do discover some points where I regret why they have not done it better, for example the fact that almost all system calls return a value, which is interpreted in one of the following ways:
- 0 means ok, -1 means a issue has occurred, which can be explored by calling the errno-macro.
- Values >= 0 are useful responses and -1 is indicating an error, which again requires calling errno.
- A pointer is returned. If the pointer is NULL, this indicates an error and requires calling errno. Sometimes (void *)-1 or similar return values are also special.
- pthreads-methods return 0 when successful or directly the error code otherwise.
Originally errno was a variable, which had to be replaced by some weird macro construction to allow multithreading and remain backwards compatible.
I would find it most natural if there where an exception mechanism in place like in Perl, Ruby, Java and many other languages, which would transport the error information. C cannot do this, at least not without breaking the language standard. The pthreads way looks good as well. Returning a struct containg the value actually needed and the errorcode, which is 0 if everything is OK, would also be a good approach, whenever a real return value is needed, but arguable a little bit clumpsy in case of functions returning a pointer. Maybe providing a pointer to some integer variable as argument would be the way for this case, even though I find it kind of ugly to have „return values done by a parameter“. Semaphores are a little bit clumsy to handle. And fcntl and ioctl are for sure overused instead of adding specific function for specific tasks. Reading a single character from a terminal or keyboard input without waiting for return is difficult, but at least logical.
Anyway, these issues can be dealt with and the power and elegance of the API is just great. The documentation is always available by using man pages that are installed on almost every system and by using great online resources on top of that.
So how does the win32- and win64-API look like? I mean apart from the religious questions like the lack of freedom? Most of the things can be done on the MS-Windows-APIs as well. There are some differences. First of all, all the code that uses system-APIs has to be rewritten. Very few typical POSIX-functions like open, close, read and write exist in the windows world as well to facilitate such a transition, but the general answer is like „it can be done, but the code has to be rewritten from scratch“. So programs that should run on both platforms and should do basically the same on both platforms need to encapsulate their system specific code, which might be anywhere between 20 and 50 percent of the code base, in specific files and organize their structure in such a way that the remaining half or more can actually be the same. It has been done by database products (PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, DB2), interpreters and compilers for programming languages (Ruby, Perl, Scala, Java, C#, F#, PHP), browsers (Firefox, Chrome), image processing software (gimp), office software (other than MS-office), web servers (Apache) and many others and they do achieve the goal to be doing more or less the same on both platforms.
Now how does the Win32- and Win64-API look like? Obviously the code looks very different. Unimportant, but very visible differences are that function names are mixed case and start with capital letter instead of being smaller case with underscores. Parameters and variables are mixed case starting with lower case. The C-type system is not directly used, but all types are #defined in some header file and all capital, even pointer types. Some care is needed to understand how these types work together, because it is not as self documenting as the original C types, but really no big deal to get used to. A MS-specific C-extension does allow using some kind of exceptions, if that is good or bad is hard say. Function names are generally longer and have huge parameter lists with very long parameter names. When they are outdated, because more parameters or different behavior or 64-bit support is needed, often an 64 or an Ex is added to the original name to create a new name for the replacement function, retaining the old one as it is for backwards compatibility.
Shared memory can more or less easily be replaced by memory mapped files and that is what needs to be done on MS-Windows.
The named pipe of Windows kind of unifies the message queue, the Unix domain sockets, the named pipes of Unix/Posix/Linux and even allows network communication within the local network. There have been linux specific extensions to Posix-pipes that achieve this unification, but not the network transparency, as well. Mutex and Semaphore work slightly differently, but can basically achieve the same results as Mutex and Semaphore on Posix. What is beautiful is that almost all operating system objects are accessed by so called HANDLEs which unifies many functions accessing them, but brings functions like WaitForSingleObject and WaitForMultipleObjects also some fcntl-like flavor, because it depends of course very much on the type of kernel object what waiting for it means. When being aware of this, it can be very powerful.
When looking for features that are really missing on one platform we observe immediately that MS-Windows does a mandatory locking on files by default and that such a mandatory locking does not at all exist in Posix or on Unix-like operating systems like MacOS-X, even though it does exist on Linux. Discussing this issue and how to deal with it should be worth its own article. In short, it is not as bad as it sounds, but the choice of the MS-Windows-guys to implement this feature in the way it is and to make it the default does look good.
The signals are missing on the windows side. This can be overcome by using Mutexes and Conditions to replace the communication part of signals, or to simply use HANDLEs to end a specific process instead of sending a signal, provided the permissions exist to do so.
Another painful omission is the fork. Most of the time fork is accompanied by an exec and exactly that can be doe by the CreateProcess in MS-Windows. Often we do like to share open files with the forked process and there are ways to do this, at least to some extent. But to use fork for creating a couple identical processes that run on the same code and data initialized once, which is sometimes a good idea, just does not exist on MS-Windows. It can be overcome by using threads and dealing with the issues of having to take responsibility for really separating the threads or by using multiple processes and memory mapped files for sharing that initial data structure.
The Win32- and Win64-APIs are documented quite well on some Microsoft-Webpage. I find the Linux-man pages slightly more useful, but both systems are documented in a way that it should be easy to find and use the original documentation and additional resources on the web.
Generally I would recommend all system programmers to have a look at the other world and how things work there. It helps enjoy and understand the beauty and power of both systems and probably maintain or even challenge the preference.
I have been teaching system programming for both platforms to college students and I enjoyed teaching and exploring these platforms with my students very much.
