On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 15:35 -0600, Gullible Jones wrote: > Anyway... What do you folks think of this idea? Feasible? Or just stupid? > A major problem is the enormous number of system calls that Windows implements. Last time I knew the numbers, and it was quite a long time ago, Unix/Linux had under 300 kernel APIs while the contemporary version of Windows had 3500. This is a reason why developing Wine is such a problem. Windows has so many because it appears to be a fairly undisciplined development shop. Each new version's project team seems to have invented a whole new set of APIs because they could and to stamp their mark on it. However, to allow any older programs to continue to run, they still have to reimplement all the older APIs too. Is it any wonder each new version is so much more bloated than the previous one? I think it would take several orders of magnitude less work to write a new Linux kernel from scratch than it will to add all the Windows APIs to an existing kernel, whether as built-ins or as a translation layer like Wine. Martin
