What are the cons?
I guess I went a bit overboard in praising the API. Because, for all its advantages,
API programming does have some critical disadvantages.
- First of all there is the learning curve. An equivalent of our simple MsgBox
function has parameters that would require the services of a qualified astrologer
to make sense of, if you are a newbie.
- It is much less forgiving of programmer errors and it is child's play to
crash your application or your system with a malformed API call. And certain
API calls when (im) properly used can even render your system unbootable or
worse.
- Then, true to Microsoft tradition some API calls do not work as advertised.
- [Editors Note]If you eventually start programming with the .net framework, api calls become a legacy; API is windows specific, and - believe it or not - the .NET framework is intended to be platform independant[/Editors Note]