Chapter Nineteen. Win32 Design Issues
BY NOW YOU’VE probably gotten a feel for some of the types of decisions that went into the design of Win32. Making it easier to port a program from 16-bit Windows to 32-bit Windows, for example, was a major motivator in the early days. Here, we dig a little deeper into the philosophy of Win32, starting with how Win32 was shaped by lessons learned from 16-bit Windows.
Why does Win32 fail a module load if an import could not be resolved?
BECAUSE WE TRIED it the other way and it was much worse.
In 16-bit Windows, a module that didn’t satisfy all its imports would still load. So long as you didn’t call a missing import, you were fine. If you did try to call a missing import, you crashed pretty spectacularly with ...
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