»In that context, we have our Build 2013 developer conference this week in San Francisco, where approximately 5000 developers have gathered in person (with many thousands more watching virtually) from around the world to discuss the next generation of software development with platforms and tools from Microsoft.«
Maybe someone just confused developers and APIs...
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/06/26/visual-...
I was worried for a minute there.
I don't know any product that could even reach 5000 API calls. Win32 isn't anywhere near that even after 20+ years.
More likely they're just sloppily enumerating function endpoints.
I think Apple meant new methods, classes and possibly even the options that you could pass as arguments.
Whatever it means I don't think that more is necessarily better and I hope no one has adding APIs as a performance metric!
> "Lion offers over 3,000 new APIs covering a range of new technologies and capabilities."
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20130425175054/https://developer....
A single function call specification is an API; and the union of two APIs is an API. So it's perfectly cromulent to say "We added 5000 new APIs to the WinRT API", as bizarre and confusing as it sounds, though AIUI only Microsoft routinely refers to single function signatures as APIs -- perhaps to make their products sound more impressive.
An API is like a platform or a mini-platform. 5,000 of them makes no sense. Do they mean 5,000 new API function calls in the Windows platform or something? Although that would be insanely large too. I don't get it.