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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?

#101

Post by scruple »

KineticLensman wrote: post #47
aerovistae wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do actually think code archaeology may one day be a sub discipline of the field, perhaps in another hundred years.

In Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" [0] one of the characters is a Programmer-at-Arms, and one of his roles is essentially software archaeology - not for the fun of it, but to keep the deeply layered software of a starship functional. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

Yes! Thank you do much for bringing this up. I read about this book in a comment on HN many years ago and have been trying to find it, or the book title, ever since. Going to bounce this to the top of my reading pile.

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

#102

Post by gmueckl »

baroffoos wrote: post #93
conover wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fantastic book. Software is written and rewritten over thousands of years, layer upon layer, powering interstellar vessels and their “automation”. It makes you wonder what Windows will look like 100 years from now, if it’s still around. Will it be easier to just write another layer on top or dig down into the original source and modify?

History seems to suggest that it will eventually get bogged down with too much junk but its too hard to rewrite and keep compatibility so eventually some fresh project without the legacy will be able to become the technically superior product and everyone will move over to that.

In theory, yes. In practice, either of two solutins will take hold: either the old system is put into a container on the new system or the application software itself obtains an emulation layer for the old system interface during the port. Either way, not a lot will be gained.

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

#103

Post by gmueckl »

keithnoizu wrote: post #33
TravHatesMe wrote: post #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 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…

The switch to git was widely publicized at that time. As far as I know, the Windows team is the only large scale team using git. Facebook is using Mercurial, Gogle is using some concoctions around Perforce, I think, and is working on a Mercurial transition. And all of these attempts for trying to make DVCS work at scale are straining their respective systems to their breaking points.

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

#104

Post by laumars »

megous wrote: post #8
laumars wrote: 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.

My benchmark was SuSE, which was 1 DVD's worth. However your post now has me wondering if that didn't contain the complete sources either - just sources for server components. That said, those 12 DVDs likely cover way more than the Windows sources would. eg multiple different image editors, LibreOffice (would Windows sources include the sources for MS Office as well?) several different databases (MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc). So even that might not be a fair comparison either?

Unfortunately without access to that source directory all of this is all just going to be speculation anyway.

I did also make the point about compression too by the way :)

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

#105

Post by laumars »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #46
laumars wrote: 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.

A better example would be one of the BSDs, where the kernel and userland are all developed together in a single source tree.

Why would that be a better example? BSDs don't write all their own desktop software. Ok, they will be some edge cases before you jump in with "OpenBSD wrote cwm". Generally speaking, there will still be a lot of other 3rd party software too such as GIMP. So BSD isn't going to be any different to Linux in that regard.

However this is all moot because the point I was making was about the centralised source repositories; those will contain not just the sources of the base Linux / BSD system (kernel + user land) but also any other source that are offered as binary packages as well (ie all the stuff that's part of the platforms build system)

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

#106

Post by simplyinfinity »

ardy42 wrote: post #97
simplyinfinity wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to have their own VCS, but moved away fairly recently, 1-2-3 years ago

> They used to have their own VCS, but moved away fairly recently, 1-2-3 years ago TFS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Foundation_Server

no, as a sister comment of this mentioned, i think it was based on perforce, they didn't use TFS for this internal project AFAIK

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

#107

Post by machinecoffee »

maxxxxx wrote: post #59
ComputerGuru wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MFC I'm not so sure about, but ATL or even better WTL would probably do the job.

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

#108

Post by machinecoffee »

8456523 wrote: post #64

> You can spend a year (seriously) just drilling down the source tree, more than a half million folders I would be more inclined to switch to Windows if its source tree were smaller . My guess is that a big reason I prefer MacOS over Windows is that Apple has been much more willing to drop support for legacy hardware and old applications to keep the source code more manageable.

As an end user, what difference does the size of the source tree make?

So long as the OS is stable, performant and has a pleasant GUI that you can interact with (or cmdline if that's your thing), was does it matter?

I'm pretty sure no user in the history of users ever cared about such a thing.

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

#109

Post by kgwxd »

conover wrote: post #87
KineticLensman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" [0] one of the characters is a Programmer-at-Arms, and one of his roles is essentially software archaeology - not for the fun of it, but to keep the deeply layered software of a starship functional. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

This is a fantastic book. Software is written and rewritten over thousands of years, layer upon layer, powering interstellar vessels and their “automation”. It makes you wonder what Windows will look like 100 years from now, if it’s still around. Will it be easier to just write another layer on top or dig down into the original source and modify?

Windows wouldnt survive in such a universe because the licensing servers would be long gone.

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

#110

Post by thesimp »

conover wrote: post #87
KineticLensman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" [0] one of the characters is a Programmer-at-Arms, and one of his roles is essentially software archaeology - not for the fun of it, but to keep the deeply layered software of a starship functional. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky

This is a fantastic book. Software is written and rewritten over thousands of years, layer upon layer, powering interstellar vessels and their “automation”. It makes you wonder what Windows will look like 100 years from now, if it’s still around. Will it be easier to just write another layer on top or dig down into the original source and modify?

Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" can be used to explain current big industrial control systems. A typical distributed control system these days transfers data across many different layers, transforming the data when it crosses each layer. Starting deep down in the plant:

* reading the 0-10V or 4-20mA signals from sensors.

* AD converters convert the values into a digital representation in field devices.

* move the data to real-time controllers that run control algorithms and send outputs back to motors/valves/pumps/etc.

* those controllers move the data often via raw Ethernet packets to other real-time controllers and Windows stations used for operator visualization.

* some Windows workstations gather data into databases for historical usage. Sometimes this is a SQL type database, sometimes a flat database used to get better storage performance.

* then data is moved to local databases that can be used by the onsite teams to analyze it in an office environment.

* then that data is then moved into big data offsite/remote storage for analysis of how the medium and long term performance of the industrial installation and comparison to other installations in other parts of the world.

* from that reports are made with key performance indicators and graphs.

And each time the data is passed up a layer the format of the data and timestamps may be adjusted to match operating system that the data is passed to.

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