Getting the API's for Windows Applications

[Francois Gouget]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, Lionel Ulmer wrote:

> > The theory is that it would be possible to estimate the amount of work
> > needed to get a Windows app to work on Wine by calculating the number of
> > API's that is not working or only half working and estimating the time
> > it would take to correct these API's.
>
> This would maybe work for all 'old-style' Win32 APIs... But as more and more
> new APIs are exported via COM, it's starting to get impossible to get
> 'static' counting of what is used.

And then there's Windows messages (WM_CLOSE, etc.). Each of these may or
may not be implemented, may or may not be sent at the right time, may or
may not be sent the right number of times, etc.

Then there's the tools like regsvr32, regedit and wcmd which are
sometimes used during the install.

In fact, most of the time it's not missing APIs that prevent an
application from working, and it's not implementing whichever API
happens to be missing that takes time either. It's all the rest of the
bug fixing.

However, gather statistics for a bunch of applications and you will get
a map of which APIs are used most often. And that could be interesting
from a geeky point of vue, but also, maybe, to help us know where to
focus code reviews, etc.

-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                Linux: It is now safe to turn on your computer.