As I mentioned in the previous post , run-time libraries in Windows provide services for applications running in User mode. For historical reasons, this run-time layer in Windows was always known as the Win32 libraries, even when these services are requested in the 64-bit OS in 32-bit mode. A good example of a Win32 run-time service is any operation that involves opening and accessing a file somewhere in the file system (or the network, or the cloud). A more involved example is the set of Win32 services an application needs to access to play an audio file, including understanding the specific audio file compressed format, and checking authorization and security. For Windows 8, a portion of the existing Win32 services in Windows were ported to the ARM hardware platform. The scope of the Win32 API is huge, and it was probably not feasible to convert all of it during the span of a single, time-constrained release cycle. Unfortunately, the fact that the new Windows 8 Runtime librar...
A blog devoted to Windows performance, application responsiveness and scalability, software performance engineering (SPE), and related topics in computer performance.