91–100 of 124 posts
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.
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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?
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Oh come on. Be honest. I can tell just from the tone of this post that you'd _never_ switch to Windows.
That's not true. It is difficult for humans to estimate how they spend their time, but my guess is that I've spent at least 35 hours recently exploring Windows 10: Changing various settings, installing software, asking Windows-specific questions of Google Search. And I'm writing this on Windows. (Except for the Windows-specific questions, I'm not counting web use in the estimated 35 hours because of course the web mo…
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…
I do actually think code archaeology may one day be a sub discipline of the field, perhaps in another hundred years.
Here's a paper of theirs where they dig into a 'first edition Unix': https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/Papers/1eUnix_cre...
I'm actually surprised they use GIT internally. I would have thought they have their own custom VCS. It says a lot about the success of GIT.
They used to have their own VCS, but moved away fairly recently, 1-2-3 years ago
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…
When I worked on Azure we had some access to the windows team data and documentation, and used an integrated build environment for some services. There are some interesting things going on under the hood mostly around building components in isolation against the spec of other libraries/services. Also I'm a little shocked their using GIT instead of source depot in their workflow, apparently they switched in 2017. Who…
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I'd have expected much more to be in C#.
From what I know for a long the OS division who writes Windows has been at war with the developer division who writes .NET and refused to use .NET. I think it has gotten a bit better recently.
https://kennykerr.ca/2019/01/25/the-state-of-cpp-on-windows/
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I'd have expected much more to be in C#.
There's no reason to write OS components in a language that will inherently give you a performance hit before you do any real work.
As note, Midori did power part of Bing during its existence.
And Microsoft security is now advising to move new development into a mix of C#, Rust and constrained C++ (Core Guidelines).