I'm actually surprised they use GIT internally. I would have thought they have their own custom VCS. It says a lot about the success of GIT.
Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
51–60 of 124 posts
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
32MB was a lot of memory back then. Typical machines at the time had 8. 16 was extravagant.
A lot of affordable machines a few years old even had 4M. I remember my dad upgraded from 4 to 8 and from Win3.11 to Win95. The computer had maybe 1 or 2 years, hardly more. It was around 1500€ (well, it was 10000 FRF at the time) when bought, with a 14" screen.
32M was insane, probably out of reach of all but rich homes.
Only a few years later (1 or 2) a classmate told us he had a computer with 128M. That sounded so ridiculous that we thought he was a mythomaniac or something. Turns out his dad was able to get a powerful workstation from work, and the first time we visited him we saw that mythical beast, and our mind were blown.
And right now the private working set of my start menu process is 27M...
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#53I'm actually surprised they use GIT internally. I would have thought they have their own custom VCS. It says a lot about the success of GIT.
Microsoft created VFS for Git, specifically because the windows kernel code was too large for git to handle without being intolerably slow (git status taking hours to complete for example).
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#54I'm actually surprised they use GIT internally. I would have thought they have their own custom VCS. It says a lot about the success of GIT.
They used to have their own VCS, but moved away fairly recently, 1-2-3 years ago
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#55A 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.
I think it already is!
See this page on "digital archaeology" describing research that studies developers and software through their "digital remains": http://digitalarchaeology.info/
It is ran by a professor at the University of Tennessee: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~audris/
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#56A 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…
>Who was this person? ...oh it was me.
and oh ... what was I thinking ... oh gosh, why is there an interface of an interface's interface, and .... oh boy, that's an embarrassing comment:
// absolve previously implemented anti-pattern by recursive reversion of the abstraction inversion
... ok, yeah that was an awkward time in my life now that I remembering it, this is exactly why I stopped listening to Enya while writing code.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#57Anybody interested in the history of NT should read Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
It focuses on Dave Cutler, the father of NT
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#58The 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.
IIRC, the NT kernel used a lot of C++ from the beginning.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#59Does 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).
It always infuriated me that MS usually wasn't using the tools they gave to developers for their own stuff. I think it has got a little better in the last years. Now they seem to be using UWP to some degree. But before that they didn't use Winforms or MFC. WPF only for VS 2010 and up.
Re: Which programming language is used for making Windows 10?
#60That’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#.
From what I know for a long the OS division who writes Windows has been at war with the developer division who writes .NET and refused to use .NET. I think it has gotten a bit better recently.