On Tue, 18 May 2004, Lionel Ulmer wrote:
The theory is that it would be possible to estimate the amount of work needed to get a Windows app to work on Wine by calculating the number of API's that is not working or only half working and estimating the time it would take to correct these API's.
This would maybe work for all 'old-style' Win32 APIs... But as more and more new APIs are exported via COM, it's starting to get impossible to get 'static' counting of what is used.
And then there's Windows messages (WM_CLOSE, etc.). Each of these may or may not be implemented, may or may not be sent at the right time, may or may not be sent the right number of times, etc.
Then there's the tools like regsvr32, regedit and wcmd which are sometimes used during the install.
In fact, most of the time it's not missing APIs that prevent an application from working, and it's not implementing whichever API happens to be missing that takes time either. It's all the rest of the bug fixing.
However, gather statistics for a bunch of applications and you will get a map of which APIs are used most often. And that could be interesting from a geeky point of vue, but also, maybe, to help us know where to focus code reviews, etc.