3 ms·

And thus we end up, over time, with an OS that is a pile of hacks upon hacks to workaround broken apps, severely limiting it's ability to provide a clean, sensi

• saagarjha 9y ago
  > I would much rather users were occasionally forced to upgrade their buggy software. Yes, that's the ideal solution, but backwards compatibility overall is a huge can of worms that doesn't really have a good solution. In this case, it might not be possible to upgrade the software (e.g. it's unmaintained, or was contracted out, etc.)
• ygra 9y ago
  Note that nowadays there aren't many of such compat hacks in the actual Windows codebase. Most applications can be coaxed to work by just shimming a few API calls and those shims can be kept separately and don't impact other software that doesn't need them. The simplest one of those would be the one that simply pretends to be an older Windows version for broken version checks to still work. There are others where HeapAlloc simply allocates a little more to prevent a buffer overflow, etc. The OS architecture no longer suffers from such things.
  • abritinthebay 9y ago
    That’s a very rosy outlook that doesn’t match with the few Windows devs I’ve spoken to. It’s better now - because they moved to abstracting a lot of that stuff as you said - but the number of man hours spent on it and the knock on effects of the overall system design is non-trivial. Plus, if they’d not had that policy they could have been where they are now in the early 2000s Kind of like OSX was.