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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?

#61

Post by stordoff »

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…

The Old New Thing can be an interesting read, that sometimes digs into why things are the way they are in Windows.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history

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

#62

Post by shpx »

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

Software archeology in a mature programming environment

http://akkartik.name/post/deepness

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

#63

Post by superasn »

Makes me wonder if there exists an OS that is truly written from scratch designed for only modern hardware and devoid of all backward compatibility and bloat (like the JS frameworks ditching support for msie).

It would be certainty a very interested side project I guess.

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

#64

Post by 8456523 »

> 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.

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

#65

Post by kpU8efre7r »

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…

>Who was this person? An insignificant developer, as I am -- did they ever become something of themselves?

What do you mean did they ever become something?

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

#66

Post by userbinator »

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.

If you've ever used any other applications written in pure Win32 you would know why --- the efficiency difference is enormous. They did start using more managed code in the system starting with Vista, which resulted in all the complaints about it being slow and bloated. I suspect there's been even more of it added since then, because the Win10 explorer.exe on a recent quad-core i7 system with an SSD still manages to respond more slowly to actions like opening a folder than XP's on a 15-year-old PC with a regular HDD...

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

#67

Post by nderjung »

superasn wrote: post #63

Makes me wonder if there exists an OS that is truly written from scratch designed for only modern hardware and devoid of all backward compatibility and bloat (like the JS frameworks ditching support for msie). It would be certainty a very interested side project I guess.

This is an interesting consideration. If you think about IoT devices, oftentimes you can find yourself designing software for a bespoke hardware system with limited resources and no room for considering backward compatibility. Paravirtualized VMs too need not necessarily require full POSIX ABIs since syscalls are more expensive and the underlying hypervisor can take care of any compatibility with the underlying hardware system.

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

#68

Post by heywire »

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…

The product that I maintain at work started life in the late 1980’s as a DOS application written in a mix of C and ASM. All of the original code comments are still present. Every once in a while I’ll go spelunking through some of those for fun.

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

#70

Post by MagicPropmaker »

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.

Oh come on. Be honest. I can tell just from the tone of this post that you'd _never_ switch to Windows.
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