Selecting tools and frameworks

We will cover a reasonable number of API topics in the following chapters. So, we should start with selecting appropriate utilities that will diminish our work. Since we will leverage a VM, we must start with choosing a hypervisor. This part has various options and sections:

• Windows
  • VMware Workstation: This product recently (2024) became free for personal use. It’s very stable, frequently updated and can forward all CPU flags to the guest OS. I’d definitely recommend this if you’re using Windows as your host OS.
  • Oracle Virtualbox: An open-source cross-platform hypervisor controlled by Oracle. It has extension packs and works quite smoothly in pretty much any Windows release. The biggest limitation when this chapter was written (and that was present for a while in the product’s history) though, was the lack of virtualization registers for guest OSs.
  • Microsoft Hyper-V: This is Windows’ embedded hypervisor. Works both...