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Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?

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Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?

#11
A project of such scale and longevity always seems to pique my interest. I bet there are some interesting historical artifacts in that codebase. Why is old code so fascinating?

Decades ago someone as insignificant as you wrote this code. I find it especially interesting to come across comments in code, which allow developers to express themselves outside the confines of the language. I feel like a historian in this context, analyzing this person's thoughts and state of mind. Perhaps the author included elements of emotion or humour. Who was this person? An insignificant developer, as I am -- did they ever become something of themselves?

I think the developer's story is rarely told, but it's a story worth telling!

Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?

#12
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Ubuntu specifically but some distro's do ship sources with their installation media and it usually fits on 1 DVD. When I say "sources" I am talking about kernel, user land and desktop applications too. However that would be compressed tarballs and doesn't include git history - the latter being where I suspect most of the disk space is being used in that screen shot.

You're off by a magnitude. https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/9.7.0/sour... Source code compresses quite well, so uncompressed, this may be somewhere between 200-250 GiB.

fair point about compressed bytes, but what about structure ? even ubuntu never felt that intimidating but maybe it's because I just didn't count folders

Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?

#15
post #9

> You can spend a year (seriously) just drilling down the source tree, more than a half million folders containing the code for every component making up the OS workstation and server products and all their editions, tools, and associated developement kits, and see what’s in there, read the file names and try to figure out what does what. This makes me really want to know how they manage to document everything to mak…

Usually when you're working on the scale of operating systems, you have people focusing on particular areas e.g. kernel teams, networking teams, graphics teams etc and you also have their corresponding test teams. So no one person usually even has understanding of the entire source code.

Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?

#18
post #9

> You can spend a year (seriously) just drilling down the source tree, more than a half million folders containing the code for every component making up the OS workstation and server products and all their editions, tools, and associated developement kits, and see what’s in there, read the file names and try to figure out what does what. This makes me really want to know how they manage to document everything to mak…

Usually when you're working on the scale of operating systems, you have people focusing on particular areas e.g. kernel teams, networking teams, graphics teams etc and you also have their corresponding test teams. So no one person usually even has understanding of the entire source code.

Not even Dave Cutler? I thought he single-handedly wrote the first version of the kernel. At least that is the legend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Lots of great stories about him. One is recounted here:

https://capitalandgrowth.org/articles/930/xbox-co-founder-my...

Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?

#19

A project of such scale and longevity always seems to pique my interest. I bet there are some interesting historical artifacts in that codebase. Why is old code so fascinating? Decades ago someone as insignificant as you wrote this code. I find it especially interesting to come across comments in code, which allow developers to express themselves outside the confines of the language. I feel like a historian in this c…

You managed to put in words the things I feel when I am working in this field.
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