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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?

#81

Post by 8456523 »

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.

This comment sits at -4. Can someone who thinks it should be downvoted explain why? I ask because I want to learn (not to argue).

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

#83

Post by colejohnson66 »

tus87 wrote: post #74

> Windows 10 is the same (evolved) code base as the code base of Windows 8.x, 7, Vista, XP, 2000, and NT Err....it's been NT all along.

They’re referencing way back when (before 2000) when it was just NT with a version number

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

#84

Post by saagarjha »

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.

I wouldn’t be surprised if macOS consisted of a similar number of lines of code.

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

#85

Post by maxxxxx »

userbinator wrote: post #66
maxxxxx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"If you've ever used any other applications written in pure Win32 you would know why"

I have written pure Win32 and I know that...

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

#86

Post by coldcat »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #36
missjellyfish wrote: post #26

The real question is: is it compiled with the same msvc compiler that ships in the SDK? If so, they don’t even use C99. C89 all the way. That especially means no variable declaration anywhere in the function body.

While MSVC doesn't have full C99 support, MSVC supported most of the features that shipped in C99 that make it much less painful to develop in C quite a number of years before C99 support formally landed in other compilers. MS will probably never support full C99 because the demand isn't there, but it's certainly not ANSI C you are expected to write.

MSVC support C11 because it a prerequisite for C++17. The limits are you need to compile in C++, so the very few changes/incompatibilities between C and C++ always bend to the C++ choices. The preprocessor isn't what people used to have in C99 so some macro still not portable.

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

#87

Post by conover »

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

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?

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

#88

Post by icebraining »

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.

Well, TempleOS (by the late Terry Davis) was designed from scratch to support only multicore x86-64 CPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

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

#89

Post by stephen_g »

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.

The problem with modern hardware is that they themselves are full of backwards compatibility. And while such a system could certainly be done (as somebody said, Fuscia is probably a fairly good example of one), it will only take a few years as hardware changes and it's going to have backwards compatibility "bloat" as well!

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

#90

Post by newen »

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

Yep Pham Nuwen :). I love The Zones of Thought books. It reallygives you an idea of how very alien intelligences might work.
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