Yesterday Microsoft Corp announced Win32S, a subset of its Win32 application programming interface to offer developers a bridge between Windows 3.1 and NT. The Win32S tool set will offer 32-bit C/C++ compiler, Win32S libraries in DLL form and a Win32S VXD driver. Independent software vendors will then have to ship the libraries and driver with their application to enable it to run under Windows 3.1. By using these components developers will get a performance improvement as they can write to linear address space and work in the 32-bit model. This is supposed to be attractive to developers currently working in other 32-bit environments who may want to move their application over to Windows 3.1 (due in April). The base code of the Windows 3.1 application can then be built on to provide an NT application without recompilation. Win 32S is not, however, a complete emulation of NT and does not support things like multi-threading, bezier curves and so on. What it does do is translate 32-bit calls down to 16-bit calls for 3.1 via thunking – similar to the technology to be found in OS/2 2.0 adding an 8% performance overhead. The product will be shipped with the next release of C/C++ 7.0 and though other compiler vendors will be offered hooks into Win32S the Microsoft C/C++ compiler will have the initial marketing advantage…
