Back in the late '80s, my company had a program that included getting the Windows 3.0 source code. Looking through the code I had found the line "goto wearefucked;" and accompanying label further down. When we got the source for Windows 3.1 the first thing I did was check that file, but to my disappointment the label had been changed.
Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
31–40 of 124 posts
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#32Earlier 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...
Cutler certainly did not write the whole first kernel alone, although the initial size of the NT team was quite small, at least at the very beginning. The story of the development (until the at least the first release, IIRC) is in the book "Show Stopper!"; quite interesting.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#33A 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…
When I worked on Azure we had some access to the windows team data and documentation, and used an integrated build environment for some services. There are some interesting things going on under the hood mostly around building components in isolation against the spec of other libraries/services.
Also I'm a little shocked their using GIT instead of source depot in their workflow, apparently they switched in 2017. Who knew. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/25/windows_is_now_buil...]
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Cutler certainly did not write the whole first kernel alone, although the initial size of the NT team was quite small, at least at the very beginning. The story of the development (until the at least the first release, IIRC) is in the book "Show Stopper!"; quite interesting.
Show Stopper is a wonderful book if you're interested in the historical development of large systems. It's second only to The Soul of a New Machine. I highly recommend it.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
The kernel is a pretty small part of the operating system. Development of Windows NT started in 1989[1], when RAM sizes of PCs were measured in MB, not GB, so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat. (NT 3.1 could run on a machine with 12 MB of RAM.[2]) Also, it wasn't the first kernel Cutler wrote. While Cutler is undoubtedly a brilliant programmer, I doubt he could keep the details of all the other parts of the system…
> so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat
That's not how NT was seen at the time. It was quite bloated relative to other PC OSs. Of course modern OS features required a bit more overhead than the crazy world of windows 3.0.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#36The 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.
While MSVC doesn't have full C99 support, MSVC supported most of the features that shipped in C99 that make it much less painful to develop in C quite a number of years before C99 support formally landed in other compilers. MS will probably never support full C99 because the demand isn't there, but it's certainly not ANSI C you are expected to write.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#37Does anyone happen to know how the Windows shell (CShell?) is built? Winforms? WPF? UWP?
None of the above. It's GDI and the widgets are most similar to those available via MFC (this talking about the classic she'll, so Metro/UWP aside).
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#38The 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.
Any code in active development would have been ported to C++ (although left in the original C "style"). The MSVC C compiler is just for back-compatibility and not intended for modern C development.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kernel is a pretty small part of the operating system. Development of Windows NT started in 1989[1], when RAM sizes of PCs were measured in MB, not GB, so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat. (NT 3.1 could run on a machine with 12 MB of RAM.[2]) Also, it wasn't the first kernel Cutler wrote. While Cutler is undoubtedly a brilliant programmer, I doubt he could keep the details of all the other parts of the system…
> so there wasn't room for a lot of bloat That's not how NT was seen at the time. It was quite bloated relative to other PC OSs. Of course modern OS features required a bit more overhead than the crazy world of windows 3.0.
I guess I should have said "a lot of bloat by today's standards"...
My first experience with NT was NT 3.51 on a 32 MB machine. If I remember well, it didn't feel much slower than Windows 3.1. But finally having a PC operating system that didn't crash all the time really made development much more pleasant and productive.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#40The 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.
>That especially means no variable declaration anywhere in the function body.
Since Visual C++ 2013 it's no longer true.