561–570 of 697 posts
I had the misfortune of having to use Azure back in 2018 and was appalled at the lack of quality, slowness. I was in GitHub forums, helping other customers suffering from lack of basic functionality, incredible prices with abysmal performance. This article explains a lot honestly. Google’s Cloud feels like the best engineered one, though lack of proper human support is worrying there compared to AWS.
What makes anyone start a new project and think “I know, I’ll use Azure!”? I really don’t get it. Do they have a great sales org? Is it because a phb thinks “well they made Office so it must be good”? I interviewed with a Dutch energy company migrating infra from AWS -to- Azure and I have no idea what would make them do that (aside from inertia, but then why use Azure in the first place?) And for some reason Azure us…
lift and shift into the cloud used to be the path of last resistance on Azure.
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I was waiting for that comment :) Remember that everybody, eventually, calls into code written in C.
It’s worse than that. Eventually everybody calls into code that hits hardware. That is the level that the compiler (ironically?) can no longer make guarantees. Registers change outside the scope of the currently running program all the time. Reading a register can cause other registers on a chip to change. Random chips with access to a shared memory bus can modify the memory that the comipler deduced was static. Ther…
"For fiscal 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned total pay of $96.5 million, up 22% from a year earlier." -CNBC.com and "I also see I have 2 instances of Outlook, and neither of those are working." -Artemis II astronaut
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was waiting for that comment :) Remember that everybody, eventually, calls into code written in C.
It’s worse than that. Eventually everybody calls into code that hits hardware. That is the level that the compiler (ironically?) can no longer make guarantees. Registers change outside the scope of the currently running program all the time. Reading a register can cause other registers on a chip to change. Random chips with access to a shared memory bus can modify the memory that the comipler deduced was static. Ther…
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> For something like Azure, people are nor fungible What I've learned from a decade in the industry is that talent is never fungible in low-demand areas. It's surprisingly hard to find people that "get it" and produce something worthwhile together.
I would say "systems design" rather than low-demand. People who can "reduce" a big system to build on a few simple concepts are few and far between. Most people just add more stuff instead.
- Rich Hickey
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They could have started with simple Valgrind sessions before moving to Rust though. Massive number of agents means microservices, and microservices are suitable for profiling/testing like that.
Visual Studio has had quite some tooling similar to it, and you can have static analysis turned on all the time. SAL also originated with XP SP2 issues. Just like there have been toons of tools trying to fix C's flaws. However the big issue with opt-in tooling is exactly it being optional, and apparently Microsoft doesn't enforce it internally as much as we thought .
A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day: Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at compani…
I’d say, they are very good at making platforms and grab everyone lock-in. But they need a good platform first. Azure seems like the first platform that is kinda shitty from the beginning and did not improve much. MBASIC was good and filled a void so it got used widely from the beginning. The language is their first platform. Later the developer tools like the IDE, compilers, still pretty solid if you ask me. MS-DOS…
Windows networks, Active Directory,etc. Azure is the continuation of that, those who run AD oftne default to Azure (that offers among other things hosted or hybrid AD environments).
> Cutler’s intent was to produce a system with the same level of quality, unshakable reliability, and attention to detail he was famous for in his work on VMS and NT. I'm not sure whether this is serious or irony.
Search VMS stability, I think the consensus is clear. Then Google VMS longest uptime, and the record is 28 years. VMS often achieved five nines over 10 years (99.999%) so no irony. He took a bunch of folks with him from DEC to Microsoft to make NT, and of course his principles. Nowadays NT is bomb-proof believe it or not. Most of the crashes are in device drivers and some rare times in the UI code (Win32k) that shoul…
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Did you miss the part that writes about the "all new code is written in Rust" order coming from the top? It also failed miserably.
That was quite interesting and now I will take another point of view of the stuff I shared previously. However given how Windows team has been anti anything not C++, it is not surprising that it actually happened like that.
I think the CTO was very public about that at RustCon and other places where he spoke.
The examples he gave were contrived, though, mostly tiny bits of old GDI code rewritten in Rust as success stories to justify his mandate. Not convincing at all.
Azure node software can be written in Rust, C, or C++ it really does not matter.
What matters is who writes it as it should be seen as “OS-level” code requiring the same focus as actual OS code given the criticality, therefore should probably be made by the Core OS folks themselves.