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Simon Tatham

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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