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This week in "HN looks at software that took thousands of devs 30 years to write and says 'eh I could've done that in a day!'"
by Litmus2336 7y ago
This week in "HN looks at software that took thousands of devs 30 years to write and says 'eh I could've done that in a day!'"
- maccard 7y agoThey could rewrite it using electron?
- toyg 7y agoDon't give them ideas!
- pas 7y agoThe fancy Win 10 settings uses a WebView basically.
- trulyrandom 7y agoThat's interesting. Where did you learn about this? One would think they'd just make it a UWP app.
- Dylan16807 7y agoNo they're not. They're looking at control panels that were mostly written between 1992 and 2000, and asking why the decade since Win7's release hasn't been enough time to get them all on the same UI framework. "that deep" should be read in terms of the resources of a large company. It's a small fraction of the OS.
- Litmus2336 7y agoI know relatively very little about win32 but I know enough to say that "getting them on the same UI framework" sounds incredibly complicated to me, and I think would entail basically a complete redoing of the control panel, which is similar to what Microsoft actually did.
- Dylan16807 7y agoRedoing the control panel except: 1. You already know exactly what functions it needs up front, unlike the first time you coded it. 2. You have much more advanced libraries and development environments available. 3. You have more years for the redo than the original took. I would not call that "incredibly complicated". I would call it "doing a significantly easier version of what you already did". And "The Control Panel isn't that deep. It's not as though Microsoft needs to create a UI for every advanced Group Policy setting." is talking about scope, not complexity. So I'll say again that it's a small fraction of the OS. (It doesn't matter how complicated it is in a vacuum, anyway. As long as the complication is on par with the rest of the OS, which it probably is, then we already know that Microsoft can handle it.) > similar to what Microsoft actually did What they actually did was redo parts of it in a giant mishmash of overlapping and conflicting UIs. Even if they need to keep around parts of the old UI for third parties to hook into, there's no good reason that the new UI is so far from complete. (Except for the obvious reason of "it wasn't a priority, they don't care as an institution that it's a horrible mess")
- Litmus2336 7y agoWin32 is a disgusting nightmare, and I pity the devs who have to re-engineer its features. For backwards compatibility reasons, I am unsure if they would be able to use new Frameworks or tools. Apple still uses ANSI C (as do so many people) because anything newer is a backwards compatibility nightmare.