7 ms·

Longhorn was slow but I doubt garbage collection was the main cause for its poor performance. First, it was mostly written in C and C++ (remember, Microsoft do

Longhorn was slow but I doubt garbage collection was the main cause for its poor performance. First, it was mostly written in C and C++ (remember, Microsoft does not rewrite Windows, it evolves it). Second, the reason it was slow was some teams checked in code which was not ready. What I mean is the code was buggy, had exceptionally poor performance, etc. The code should never have been shared with the entire Windows organization. Note teams could have private source code repositories and Windows builds. Changes did not have to be shared with the entire Windows team. The better teams shared their changes when they worked and were ready. On Vista, a lot of teams shared things which were far from ready. Note that this was unusual and did not happen on Windows XP.

GeekyBear 3y ago
> Longhorn was slow but I doubt garbage collection was the main cause for its poor performance. Longhorn was refereed to as Cairo.net, as a callback to a previous Cairo project from the 90's that failed to ship and as a reference the drive to improve security through the use of memory safe garbage collected code.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  I never heard that term internally (it's possible it was used in some parts of the organization, but it was not used in my part). I know some new APIs used .NET and I suspect that there were some apps which used .NET/C#, VB, etc. However, I do not think that accounted for the performance problems or the massive increase in memory use (from about 128 mb to 1-2 GB). If you are going to claim garbage collection caused performance problems, you need to state what part of the operating system used .NET or GC and why using those technologies caused problems.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > I suspect that there were some apps which used .NET/C# Several of the tentpole features of Longhorn were based on .NET and managed code. > First and foremost, while Windows Server 2003™ embraced managed code by being the first operating system to ship with the .NET Framework preinstalled, Longhorn is the first operating system whose major new features are actually based on the .NET Framework. ... Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. In contrast to PDC03LH, Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework. https://web.archive.org/web/20051212045841/http://www.grimes.demon.co.uk/dotnet/vistaAndDotnet.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20051212045841/http://www.grimes...

GeekyBear 3y ago

> Longhorn was slow but I doubt garbage collection was the main cause for its poor performance. Longhorn was refereed to as Cairo.net, as a callback to a previous Cairo project from the 90's that failed to ship and as a reference the drive to improve security through the use of memory safe garbage collected code.

StressedDev 3y ago
I never heard that term internally (it's possible it was used in some parts of the organization, but it was not used in my part). I know some new APIs used .NET and I suspect that there were some apps which used .NET/C#, VB, etc. However, I do not think that accounted for the performance problems or the massive increase in memory use (from about 128 mb to 1-2 GB). If you are going to claim garbage collection caused performance problems, you need to state what part of the operating system used .NET or GC and why using those technologies caused problems.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > I suspect that there were some apps which used .NET/C# Several of the tentpole features of Longhorn were based on .NET and managed code. > First and foremost, while Windows Server 2003™ embraced managed code by being the first operating system to ship with the .NET Framework preinstalled, Longhorn is the first operating system whose major new features are actually based on the .NET Framework. ... Microsoft appears to have concentrated their development effort in Vista on native code development. In contrast to PDC03LH, Vista has no services implemented in .NET and Windows Explorer does not host the runtime, which means that the Vista desktop shell is not based on the .NET runtime. The only conclusion that can be made from these results is that between PDC 2003 and the release of Vista Beta 1 Microsoft has decided that it is better to use native code for the operating system, than to use the .NET framework. https://web.archive.org/web/20051212045841/http://www.grimes.demon.co.uk/dotnet/vistaAndDotnet.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20051212045841/http://www.grimes...