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?<p>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 context, analyzing this person's thoughts and state of mind. Perhaps the author included elements of emotion or humour. Who was this person? An insignificant developer, as I am -- did they ever become something of themselves?<p>I think the developer's story is rarely told, but it's a story worth telling!
Back in the late '80s, my company had a program that included getting the Windows 3.0 source code. Looking through the code I had found the line "goto wearefucked;" and accompanying label further down. When we got the source for Windows 3.1 the first thing I did was check that file, but to my disappointment the label had been changed.
This post is kind of dramatic. Windows is much more than a simple kernel: it is a collection of drivers, tools, a desktop envinroment, a network stack, user base applications (like Paint), etc, etc.<p>If you compare it to the entire Ubuntu project, you will se a project of similar dimensions.
> You can spend a year (seriously) just drilling down the source tree, more than a half million folders containing the code for every component making up the OS workstation and server products and all their editions, tools, and associated developement kits, and see what’s in there, read the file names and try to figure out what does what.<p>This makes me really want to know how they manage to document everything to make such a huge project easy to work with.
Anybody interested in the history of NT should read <i>Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft</i><p>It focuses on Dave Cutler, the father of NT
500 GB strikes me as quite small. The entire Git repository (it sounds like Microsoft uses Git internally) must be a whole heck of a lot larger than this if there are over 60,000 commits every few weeks.<p>Still, it’s a mammoth project, which makes it all the more impressive that it works (most of the time).
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.
remember the MinWin project ? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin</a><p>I wonder if it helped shrinking the code base too
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).<p>It would be certainty a very interested side project I guess.
> You can spend a year (seriously) just drilling down the source tree, more than a half million folders<p>I would be more inclined to switch to Windows if its source tree were <i>smaller</i>.<p>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.