Support Board
Date/Time: Tue, 17 Feb 2026 06:11:52 +0000
Post From: Understanding Sierra Chart Work to Port To Linux and Windows is Doomed
| [2026-01-10 23:16:33] |
| Sierra_Chart Engineering - Posts: 22880 |
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Some questions have come up, where some users are thinking that maybe support for Windows is going to be removed based on some of our statements. This is just not going to happen! And it is an annoyance of a question because inherently we know the complete stupidity and burden of doing this. Once again this is not going to happen. Window is indeed is not a serious, trustworthy or legitimate operating system at this point in time. A combination of a laptop and Windows 11, running on that laptop and with a battery is not a viable product. This is based on our own experience. Others may have different experiences, but this is our own experience and we would never even consider such a configuration. Businesses who use windows, cannot be burdened with problems, upgrades, interface changes requiring lost productivity and retraining, usability issues, stability issues and on and on and on with all the mayhem that Microsoft is creating. There is no other choice, but for businesses to begin to abandon Windows, This will need to happen gradually, it may take a very long time, maybe even 10 years. It is clear this shift is happening and going to continue to happen. The benefit is maintaining stability, consistency and usability, with IT infrastructure. And a cost savings. A huge cost savings. Not only the money saved on windows, but also gains in productivity, by eliminating all of the problems associated with Microsoft products and changes from those products. Libre Office is a great alternative to Microsoft office products. Internally, for the little amount of use of spreadsheet, and word processing we do, this is what we use: Libre Office And internally, we gradually are going to move our server processes off of windows and onto Linux. We are going to allow, two years for this. Our web services already run on Linux and that will not change. The reason Sierra Chart will always continue to support Windows is that there is nothing to gain by removing support for Windows. Windows does not create any more of a support burden upon us. Actually would be more of a support burden if we removed windows. And we do not have to pay Microsoft any money. Microsoft is actually a huge beneficiary, of all of the development that has been done on windows over the decades. It would also be a lot of work to remove support for Windows, and really there is simply nothing to gain from this. There simply is nothing to gain by doing this. And also inherently even though the internal architecture and code base of Sierra Chart is being changed to eliminate Microsoft specific code, in the non-OS layer, a lot of areas of that code, still architecturally or syntax wise, are modeled around the Windows API. Take for example when we set the position of a window. This is one of the function calls: else if (m_MDIWindowPlacement.WindowState == c_Window::WINDOW_STATE_NORMAL
&& !m_MDIWindowPlacement.NormalSizeWindowRectangle.IsRectNull()) { SetWindowPos({}, m_MDIWindowPlacement.NormalSizeWindowRectangle.left, m_MDIWindowPlacement.NormalSizeWindowRectangle.top, m_MDIWindowPlacement.NormalSizeWindowRectangle.Width(), m_MDIWindowPlacement.NormalSizeWindowRectangle.Height(), COMMON_WINDOW_POSITION_FLAGS); } SetWindowPos calls into our c_Window class (not provided here) and that then calls: bool n_OSLayer::c_WindowWrapper::SetWindowPos
( const c_WindowWrapper& hWndInsertAfter , int XPosition , int YPosition , int Width , int Height , unsigned int uFlags ) const { return ::SetWindowPos ( m_WindowHandle , hWndInsertAfter.GetHandle() , XPosition , YPosition , Width , Height , uFlags ) != FALSE; } The basic point of this, is that the original call to SetWindowPos has a syntax very similar to the windows API call. The only difference is that we do not work with this type directly: HWND. There is a wrapper class that goes around that type. So the main code base of Sierra Chart, is isolated from the windows API. However, a lot of the code, still has syntax and modeling closely resembling the windows API. So Sierra Chart still inherently is designed to work with windows but can be without great difficulty ported to other operating systems and used on other compilers. So there is simply nothing to gain by removing support for Windows even though hypothetically even if we did remove support for Windows, Sierra Chart still would have an internal architecture design that allows it to be use with windows very easily anyway. Now there is a very firm rule which has existed, for probably about more than 10 years now. And that is that we refuse to use any new functionality, beyond what is available in windows 7 in order to maintain compatibility with Windows 7, and there are other important reasons as well for this. The fewer windows API functions that Sierra Chart uses in the operating system makes it easier to port to another operating system. So we will only use standard operating system functions. And it exposes Sierra Chart to less operating system issues using a smaller number of functions. Software compatibility layers like wine, are going to work very reliably for programs like Sierra Chart because we use only the most basic and limited amount of functionality in the windows API. There is one exception to this, and that is the network I/O layer in Sierra Chart does use the highest performance interface, that the windows API has for network I/O, because high-performance is absolutely critical in that area. In the case of file I/O, the standard API functions for file I/O do deliver good performance, and we always write to files, on a background thread and any significant reading, is also done on a background thread. Sierra Chart Support - Engineering Level Your definitive source for support. Other responses are from users. Try to keep your questions brief and to the point. Be aware of support policy: https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=PostingInformation.php#GeneralInformation For the most reliable, advanced, and zero cost futures order routing, use the Teton service: Sierra Chart Teton Futures Order Routing Date Time Of Last Edit: 2026-01-10 23:30:17
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