Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

Post by tadfisher » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 4:58 AM UTC

mananaysiempre wrote: post #225

Tempest1981 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to remember Win95 on FAT32 (or exFAT?)... on a large hard disk, wasn't the smallest file size 32KB or 64KB? Different times...

I could swear this was the cluster size for FAT32 on a 2G drive, but apparently not[1], this is the cluster size for FAT16 on 2G. FAT is just utterly dumb in how it does space allocation: it doesn’t even have a bitmap, it’s just a gigantic dense array of linked list nodes (the eponymous file allocation table). Perfectly fine for a 360K floppy on a 32K machine, predictably painful for a 2G hard drive on a 32M machine.…

Post by nikau » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 6:35 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #290

sumtechguy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do similar on windows. However, the registry was turned into trying to solve a slightly different issue of roaming users, and centrally managed settings, split by machine and user, and using what became active directory. They started off with OLE and its central store of holding name value pairs in a tree. Basically making the registry do at least 4 different things. Only one of them it does 'ok' (COM/OLE loo…

It should be noted that putting configuration into files rather than registry has been the standing recommendation on Windows for a very long time now. For example, .NET 2.0 (2005) added a standard facility for application settings, and it was implemented on top of XML .config files.

Post by lionkor » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 6:46 AM UTC

DominikD wrote: post #172

Filesystem fetishization at its finest. Not only is /etc poorly structured (just like portions of the registry are), it also suffers from lack of uniform format for the data. But hey, registry is bad because it's bad.

Post by CamperBob2 » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:26 AM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #299

CamperBob2 wrote: post #274

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Microsoft's secret is, and always has been, incompetent competition. If you invent a time machine, don't kill Bill when you go back. Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers.

> Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers. When I was much younger I, too, thought this way. Reality, however, does not align with this at all. Better products do not necessarily win. I might even go as far as saying that they almost never win. The vast majority of products --not just software, anything-- are mediocre at best. What they do is solve a problem. One thing engineers, develop…

Post by veltas » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:55 AM UTC

trasz wrote: post #267

veltas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but that is the comparison being made, that the registry is like a filesystem and thus should have just been a filesystem. If the suggestion is to put many fields in one file then that's a different suggestion.

There have been filesystems that don’t use strict block sizes - Reiser4 IIRC. It’s not done often because the savings are tiny and it complicates implementation a lot. A bigger problem I can see is that Unix file system semantics is… hairy; see rename(2) atomicity guarantees for example. So it could make sense to replace it not with a typical filesystem, but something more RESTful.