Neither does the Windows kernel have the specific apis that Windows applications call.
It’s not very visible nowadays but the Windows kernel has it’s own api and loads subsystems to support different apis for applications. All these subsystems died out long ago but the win32 subsystem which still lives on.
The win32 subsystem conceptually is not too far from Wine. The big difference is just how much effort MS puts into it and their long experience (and hacks and special cases for backwards compatibility).
Long time ago MS offered a posix subsystem, for example, so you could run Unix apps on Windows. (It was a bit half-assed however, they didn’t really want people to use it, they just wanted people not to buy Unix workstations)
stat_rosa@lemy.nl 3 days ago
Thank you. I already thought this would be the case.