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From: richi@hpopd.pwd.hp.com (Richard Jennings)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Any News on Windows 3.2 (i.e. 32-Bit Windows)
Message-ID: <37140020@hpopd.pwd.hp.com>
Date: 21 May 91 12:07:39 GMT
References: <6497@vela.acs.oakland.edu>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard CCG-PWD, UK.
Lines: 47

MS say that win32 is now being called Windows 4.0.  SDKs will ship ``before the end of the year''.

It will extend the existing set of Windows API calls with new 32-bit
kernel, graphics, and network API calls.  Windows-32 will allow each
application to have a large flat address space (up to 2 GigaBytes per
application) which is protected from corruption by other applications.
It will also provide multiple threads and preemptive multitasking.  The
Windows 3 API will be extended rather than replaced, and minimal changes
to existing applications will be required.  Windows 3 applications will
run unmodified under Windows-32, but all such applications will run in
the same address space and will not be protected from one another.  They
will be protected from Windows-32 applications, and vice-versa.  The
Windows-32 graphics extensions will include:  paths, Bezier curves,
transforms, correlations, device-independent colour, and a \mbox{``mass
BitBlt''} for updating portions of screen quickly.  The network
extensions will include support for IPC (Inter-Process Communication)
with peer-to-peer named pipes, and mailslots.  These features are
currently part of LAN Manager.  International support will be improved
by the addition of a single, large character set called Unicode.

As far as the problems which will need to be overcome in moving from
Windows-16 to Windows-32 go, MS claim that no restructuring of source
code would be required, and that minimal source code changes will be
required.  Problems to be overcome fall into three main categories:
differences in sizes of basic types (e.g.\ int, HANDLE), differences in
memory model (segmented vs.\ flat), and differences between 386/486 and
MIPS architectures (structure alignment, etc.).


Thanks to Patrick Hyland who took the trouble to type this stuff in,
from the Developers' Conference.

Regards,

richi.
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  Richard Jennings,  Software Development Engineer
  Pinewood Information Systems Division,           the home of HP's Advanced
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         >> Of course, I don't speak for Hewlett-Packard <<