Performance By Design

This is the next installment in a series of blog posts on the recent Windows 8 release that I began a few months back . In the last entry I expressed some reservations about the architectural decisions associated with the new Windows Runtime API layer. In this post and the ones that follow, I will provide more detail about my concerns as we look inside the new Windows Runtime layer. But, first, we will need some background on the native C language Win32 API, COM, and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) used in the .NET Framework. Collectively, these three facilities represent the run-time services available to Windows application prior to Windows 8. As I mentioned in the earlier posts, the new Windows Runtime layer in Windows 8 is a port of a subset of the existing Windows Win32 run-time to run on the ARM hardware platform. Windows Run-time Libraries Run-time libraries in Windows provide an API layer that applications running in User mode can call to request services fr...