I prefer to believe they just merged the two branches in SourceSafe.
Microsoft never used SourceSafe for anything important internally.
This I can believe.
How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
41–50 of 114 posts
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#42What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified.
Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other article seems to imply Windows 95 used UTF16 (or UCS2, but either way 16-bit chars) so I'm confused about porting code being a problem. Was it that the APIs in 95 were still kind of a halfway point?
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I enjoyed MS source safe and exclusive file locking.
Perforce also did exclusive file locking (and I believe Microsoft ended up using a customized Perforce internally at some point).
sd was a light customization of p4
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97...
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#44As much as the tech industry loves to hate on Microsoft, it’s really quite amazing what they were able to do with fairly primitive tools operating on huge, complex code bases.
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#45What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified. Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other…
Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit.
As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet".
By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF-32 and UTF-16 -- in Unicode 1.0, the 16-bit encoding was just called "Unicode" as there were no other encodings of unicode.
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three way merges were a thing before 2005... The author was merely comparing with today's tools.
I wonder what percentage of people on HN have ever used subversion or cvs, let alone older systems.
I remember moving from SCCS to RCS because it was considered superior.
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#47What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified. Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other…
[deleted]
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#48What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified. Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other…
Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit. As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet". By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF…
> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented
That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for a lot of them 2 bytes per symbol was still all that you could possibly need.
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit. As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet". By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF…
> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for…
>, UTF-8 predates Windows NT.
Windows NT started development in 1988 and the public beta was released in July 1992 which happened before Ken Thompson devised UTF-8 on a napkin in September 1992. Rob Pike gave a UTF-8 presentation at USENIX January 1993.
Windows NT general release was July 1993 so it's not realistic to replace all UCS-16 code with UTF-8 after January 1993 and have it ready in less than 6 months. Even Linux didn't have UTF-8 support in July 1993.
Re: How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit. As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet". By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF…
> Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented That's not true, UTF-8 predates Windows NT. It's just that the jump from ASCII to UCS2 (not even real UTF16) was much easier and natural and at the time a lot of people really thought that it would be enough. Java made the same mistake around the same time. I actually had the very same discussions with older die-hard win developers as late as 2015, for…
UTF-8 was invented in 1992 and was first published in 1993. Windows NT 3.1 had its first public demo in 1991, was scheduled for release in 1992 and was released in 1993.
Technically UTF-8 was invented before the first Windows NT release, but they would have had to rework a nearly finished and already delayed OS