WinRT is Replacing Win32 [SuperSite blog]

Excerpt from a Paul Thurrott Windows 8 reality check

One of the confusing bits about WinRT is, well, everything. But after conferring with others and studying Microsoft's documentation, I can make the following general statement: WinRT (the new Windows Run Time) is not a replacement for Silverlight or .NET, it's a replacement for Win32. And that means that it's the new native runtime for Windows, and not a managed code layer that sits higher on the stack. And that means further than the layers that do sit on top of WinRT--XAML/C# (and other languages), HTML/JavaScript, and DirectX--are far less abstracted from native code than was previously thought.

This has many ramifications. It means that all of these layers--XAML/C# (and other languages), HTML/JavaScript, and DirectX--will have basically identical capabilities. And it means that HTML and JavaScript applications will likely run just as fast, generally speaking, as do C# and XAML apps, something I suspect will be surprising to many people.

WinRT is Replacing Win32