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Windows is incredibly hampered by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility. There's a ton of ugly stuff that could have been jettisoned by now if it wasn'

Windows is incredibly hampered by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility. There's a ton of ugly stuff that could have been jettisoned by now if it wasn't for the need to support some program written in 1990 for the windows 2.0 API. I agree there are many benefits to backwards compatibility, and in some cases it is warranted (though these days you can use virtual machines to achieve much the same goals). Apple made a different choice, and their platform is all the better for it. I like that they deprecate things and don't keep us held back by ancient technology.

ksk 13y ago
Do you have any specific examples of how its "incredibly hampered"?
- peterkelly 13y ago
  The most extreme I can think of was one reported by Raymond Chen on his "The Old New Thing" blog which I can't find the specific link for, but is discussed in an article by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html To quote: "I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."
  - ksk 13y ago
    You picked a particularly poor example. The application compatibility layer does not incredibly hamper the OS whatsoever. First of all the ACL is only active when known executables that have problems with the newer versions are running. As an educated guess it would not take more than a millisecond to ID the .exe. Secondly what the ACL does is fairly benign - what it amounts to in simple terms is that it simply uses a different code path for a very narrow set of functions. The cost associated with loading an 'extra library' is so marginal that you would find it hard to measure.
    - valleyer 13y ago
      Plus if you don't think every consumer OS does this to a certain extent, you're uninformed.

ksk 13y ago

Do you have any specific examples of how its "incredibly hampered"?

peterkelly 13y ago
The most extreme I can think of was one reported by Raymond Chen on his "The Old New Thing" blog which I can't find the specific link for, but is discussed in an article by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html To quote: "I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."
- ksk 13y ago
  You picked a particularly poor example. The application compatibility layer does not incredibly hamper the OS whatsoever. First of all the ACL is only active when known executables that have problems with the newer versions are running. As an educated guess it would not take more than a millisecond to ID the .exe. Secondly what the ACL does is fairly benign - what it amounts to in simple terms is that it simply uses a different code path for a very narrow set of functions. The cost associated with loading an 'extra library' is so marginal that you would find it hard to measure.
  - valleyer 13y ago
    Plus if you don't think every consumer OS does this to a certain extent, you're uninformed.