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Came here to opine on the exact same topic! I was going to dig up some Raymond Chen blog entries but your CreateFont example illustrates it equally well. I gues

Came here to opine on the exact same topic! I was going to dig up some Raymond Chen blog entries but your CreateFont example illustrates it equally well. I guess hacks are inevitable when you are dealing with that kind of scale/complexity.

prostoalex 14y ago
It's less of a scale issue and more of an ease of update issue. Back in the days someone who bought a copy of Windows would take it home, and if it broke some existing software they used, they were going to blame the OS and return it to the store (they surely are not returning WordPerfect or Adobe product that they bought eons ago). Having always-connected clients and ability to force-update the code changes the game. I wonder if the backwards compatibility culture is still prevalent in Microsoft Windows division, provided they could always push a fix via Windows Update, or tell Adobe, etc. to fix their stuff.
- ygra 14y ago
  Windows Vista shipped with around 6000 fixes for applications, ranging from "this is a game, add it to the Games Explorer", over "report the Windows version as XP because they broke their checks" to "let HeapAlloc allocate a few more bytes each time because they overrun a buffer at some point". The nice thing about those shims is that you don't have to sully your API design with individual hacks and fixes for dozens, hundreds or thousands of applications. You just enable certain behaviour externally which then replaces the API function by a wrapper (or another function entirely) for that process. This list usually only grows longer (and includes older versions of MS' own software too). There's also plenty of software where the vendor isn't around anymore which is still widely used. You can't just tell them to fix their code because they don't exist anymore. Raymond Chen oftentimes has to argue that part and given that he worked on application compatibility on Windows for quite some time I'm inclined to believe him.

prostoalex 14y ago

It's less of a scale issue and more of an ease of update issue. Back in the days someone who bought a copy of Windows would take it home, and if it broke some existing software they used, they were going to blame the OS and return it to the store (they surely are not returning WordPerfect or Adobe product that they bought eons ago). Having always-connected clients and ability to force-update the code changes the game. I wonder if the backwards compatibility culture is still prevalent in Microsoft Windows division, provided they could always push a fix via Windows Update, or tell Adobe, etc. to fix their stuff.

ygra 14y ago
Windows Vista shipped with around 6000 fixes for applications, ranging from "this is a game, add it to the Games Explorer", over "report the Windows version as XP because they broke their checks" to "let HeapAlloc allocate a few more bytes each time because they overrun a buffer at some point". The nice thing about those shims is that you don't have to sully your API design with individual hacks and fixes for dozens, hundreds or thousands of applications. You just enable certain behaviour externally which then replaces the API function by a wrapper (or another function entirely) for that process. This list usually only grows longer (and includes older versions of MS' own software too). There's also plenty of software where the vendor isn't around anymore which is still widely used. You can't just tell them to fix their code because they don't exist anymore. Raymond Chen oftentimes has to argue that part and given that he worked on application compatibility on Windows for quite some time I'm inclined to believe him.