@Skye that is a bit difficult when you maintain a piece...

@Skye that is a bit difficult when you maintain a piece of primarily-Windows software!

I mean, yes, I _do_ do most PuTTY development on Linux, because most of the complexity is in the cross-platform code anyway. But testing and developing on Windows is still necessary some of the time, either for mysterious bugs, or changes to the GUI in particular.

Like 27 February at 15:10 | Open on hachyderm.io

3 comments

Skye

@simontatham I'm not too familiar with client software programming, but isn't C/Rust universal? Wouldn't you be able to call upon the ui renderer to do the rest.
Also VMs exist.

27 February at 15:21 | Open on mstdn.social

Simon Tatham

@Skye there are cross-platform GUI toolkits that would let you write an application for multiple platforms with 90% of the code not needing to change.

But that way you also lose a lot of detailed platform integration – you're limited to the common subset of functionality. Also, the 10% where you had to do fiddly porting stuff is where most of the bugs end up, so you'd deal with it much more than 10% of the time!

PuTTY talks directly to the Win32 API, so its GUI code is all custom.

27 February at 15:29 | Open on hachyderm.io

Skye

@simontatham Putty also looks like it is from Windows 95. If you want a windows platform I can recommend UWP, the only thing I worked with before switching.

27 February at 15:43 | Open on mstdn.social