41–50 of 124 posts
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.
ISO C support has been improved to the extent required by ISO C++ compatibility requirements to ISO 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).
Keep in mind that to manage the insane scale, Microsoft internally hides git behind a custom virtual file system: https://vfsforgit.org/ https://github.com/Microsoft/VFSForGit
There was Prolog in the network stack configuration system. At least there was way back when.
Using Prolog in Windows NT Network Configuration
http://web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1497638836
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This post is kind of dramatic. Windows is much more than a simple kernel: it is a collection of drivers, tools, a desktop envinroment, a network stack, user base applications (like Paint), etc, etc. If you compare it to the entire Ubuntu project, you will se a project of similar dimensions.
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.
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…
I do actually think code archaeology may one day be a sub discipline of the field, perhaps in another hundred years.
> 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…
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…
...oh it was me.
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…
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix-win2000/invitedt...