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remember the MinWin project ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin I wonder if it helped shrinking the code base too
That’s a little surprising. I would have figured that outside the kernel/drivers, it’d be all C++.
500 GB strikes me as quite small. The entire Git repository (it sounds like Microsoft uses Git internally) must be a whole heck of a lot larger than this if there are over 60,000 commits every few weeks. Still, it’s a mammoth project, which makes it all the more impressive that it works (most of the time).
That’s a little surprising. I would have figured that outside the kernel/drivers, it’d be all C++.
I'd have expected much more to be in C#.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he said the actual "Windows source code", not the git repo containing all of its changes
If the reported size was from that fs command (assuming that is similar to linux's du) and that he did it in his git clone version, then it includes all the git files, including file versions (that with 60k changes every 2 weeks should be pretty huge), and branches (different editions, targetted to different markets, etc, that may not have trivial changes). I don't think he copied the structure without the git files…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he said the actual "Windows source code", not the git repo containing all of its changes
If the reported size was from that fs command (assuming that is similar to linux's du) and that he did it in his git clone version, then it includes all the git files, including file versions (that with 60k changes every 2 weeks should be pretty huge), and branches (different editions, targetted to different markets, etc, that may not have trivial changes). I don't think he copied the structure without the git files…
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/optimizing-git-beyond-...:
”GVFS allows our developers to simply not download most of those 3.5 million files during a clone, and instead simply page in the (comparatively) small portion of the source tree that a developer is working with.”
Having said that, the linked https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/learn/git/gvfs... claims Windows gives a size about half that 500GB for the Windows source code:
”the Windows repo, which has over 3 million files in the working directory, totalling 270GB of source files. That’s 270GB in the working directory, at the tip of master. To clone this repo, you would have to download a packfile that is about 100GB in size, which would take hours. And once you’ve succeeded in cloning it, local git operations like checkout (3 hours), status (8 minutes), and commit (30 minutes) would still take way too long to run”.
The real question is: is it compiled with the same msvc compiler that ships in the SDK? If so, they don’t even use C99. C89 all the way. That especially means no variable declaration anywhere in the function body.
In C89 you can declare variables in the middle of the function, as long as they're at the beginning of a { block }. The beginning of a function is somewhat of a special-case of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Other well known kernels were also written by very small teams. The first Unix kernel was written by two people and the first Linux kernel was written by one person.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Development
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Hardware_requiremen...
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…