Microsoft Developing Dynamic API Detection Technology

[IInuyasha74]

Microsoft is working on a new dynamic API detection technology that will help simplify programming of applications and extend software support.

Microsoft Developing Dynamic API Detection Technology : Read more

 

[robax91]

Sounds great if they can pull it off.

 

[rcmaniac25]

That's interesting.

The upside is failover cases as mentioned in the article and seemingly automatic upgrades as stuff changes (AKA, code deprecation).

My worry is if this "contract" (used differently from "Design by contract") means that API usage can be swapped. What if I, say, add an ad to my app. What's to stop this from going "you seem to be using an ad API that may be slow and buggy, I'll swap out that API with my own which is fast an efficient... but you won't get the ad revenue"? You may never know (enough OSes have a "is debugger attached" check with certain high-use functions). Is it likely? No... but unless the source code is available, or they forgot to put the "is debugger attached" check before the function swap, what's letting you know that it happens?

If that is not the case, great.

 

[mavikt]

This just lead me to think of May’s Law: “Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating for Moore’s Law.”

 

[jprahman]

So this is basically an API for APIs...

 

[natcparis]

I'm really wondering if this is really the right way to go for Microsoft.

 

[bit_user]

This is an interesting counterpoint to their traditional "embrace and extend" philosophy, whereby Microsoft implements some standard API or format, and extends it with proprietary features that lock apps into their implementation. My guess is that they want to make it easy to swap in their implementation for apps written against competing APIs.

As a shear matter of practicality, I wonder how general it'll really be. Perhaps this is some marketing spin, when the reality is that some MS employees will be hand-coding the actual translation layer for each API. I actually hope that's the case, because any developer who's ever ported anything from one API to another will tell you that they're rarely identical in function. Constructs in one API nearly always have slightly different semantics and work in slightly different ways than comparable elements of similar APIs. So, color me skeptical.