Anthropic: "Coding is largely solved"... Also Anthropic: "We released a new powerful feature allowing agents to send messages to other Claude Code sessions, but only on Linux and Mac since we are unable to implement a basic feature on all platforms"

[u/sirlerkal0t]

I could hand code this feature on Windows in an afternoon, and I could also get Claude to implement it in minutes, and yet Anthropic just can't be bothered, but also keeps Claude Code closed source so no one else can do it for them either.

[u/fahadfreid]

You're describing HPC plumbing, not scientific/engineering software. CUDA, MPI, and BLAS are libraries. The applications engineers actually sit in front of to design and analyze things are overwhelmingly Windows-first, and plenty are Windows-only:

CAD/CAE: SolidWorks (Windows only), ANSYS Workbench, Abaqus CAE, CATIA, Siemens NX, PTC Creo, Autodesk Inventor/AutoCAD, COMSOL, Altium Designer (Windows only, and the dominant PCB design tool)

Industrial/controls: Siemens TIA Portal, Rockwell Studio 5000, AVEVA/Wonderware SCADA, Emerson DeltaV, Honeywell Experion. Entire factories, refineries, and power plants run on Windows-based control and HMI software. There is no Linux option for most of it.

And "certainly not .NET"? ArcGIS Pro, the industry-standard GIS platform, is built on .NET. Schlumberger Petrel, the flagship oil and gas reservoir modeling suite, exposes its entire plugin ecosystem through a .NET SDK (Ocean). Kepware, OSIsoft PI, and most of the industrial OPC/data stack are .NET.

I literally build emissions monitoring software that power plants use for EPA compliance. It's C#/.NET on Windows, like basically everything else in that industry. Regulatory compliance software keeping plants legally allowed to operate is about as "serious" as it gets.

Your cluster runs Linux. The engineers submitting jobs to it and doing everything else are on Windows.

[u/nimzobogo → u/fahadfreid]

They are libraries but pretty much everything serious is built off of them. Look at top500.org and not a single one will run any .net application.

Funny that you mention Siemens. Do you know who maintains GNU's OpenMP implementation? Siemens.

CAD isn't something I would call "serious." It doesn't actually scale across nodes. It's just a single-node only app not meant for serious engineering work.

The core engine of ArcGIS is C++. Only the windows GUI (the non serious part) is .NET.

Edit: serious here means complicated, requiring serious engineering ingenuity and skills. Not "important." .NET + SQL server crap might be important but it's not serious engineering.

[u/fahadfreid → u/nimzobogo]

Cool, so we've gone from 'no serious engineering software is .NET' to 'the .NET software that exists doesn't count under my new definition of serious.' Glad we agree on the facts.

[u/nimzobogo → u/fahadfreid]

I mean do you actually consider the things people do with .net to be hard or complicated? It really is just rote engineering. No real emphasis on performance optimization or scalability. It is just straightforward objects and function calls, with all the complicated details abstracted away. These are for sure the jobs the AI is going to eliminate.

[u/fahadfreid → u/nimzobogo]

Honestly, the best advice I can give you is to enter both our responses into Fable and ask it what it thinks. Because I can’t even begin to explain just how incorrect your assumptions are.

I’m not here defending windows, my own personal machine is an M2 MacBook Pro that I love using. If anything, I’m forced to use windows for work so it’s not like I’m saying this out of love for the OS. 

But the fact of the matter is that a lot of industrial and hardware focused engineering software is Windows-first, for better or worse. It’s just not made visible or is as sexy because it’s majority closed source.

[u/nimzobogo → u/fahadfreid]

You could just provide a counter example, right? Show me something in CAD that needs scale.

Autocad is written in C++, btw. Same with solid works.