4 ms·
Stackoverflow runs on Windows, really?
by gtrubetskoy 13y ago
Stackoverflow runs on Windows, really?
- isuraed 13y agoThought this was well known. SO was founded by Joel Spolsky who was a long time MS employee.
- mjibson 13y agoI believe Joel was a short time MS employee. And I think the MS stack was chosen because that's what Jeff Atwood and the other early folks knew best at the time.
- jaredsohn 13y agoYeah, relatively short. Spolsky was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994 (he drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy.)
- benched 13y agoPeople seem to get a premium on their perceived 'time' spent at MS for being earlier employees, which often correlates with how important a system they worked on.
- sdegutis 13y agoI recently had an epiphany: operating systems are just operating systems. None are better than the others, they're just different. Having tried nearly all of them by now (MS-DOS, Windows *, Mac OS X, Linux), I regret having any loyalty to any of them.
- sdegutis 13y agoThat said, I tried out VS Express the other night, and I forgot just how neat it is after all these years (last one I used was VB6). Certainly starting to prefer it over Xcode. And I'm loving Windows 8's UI/UX innovation over OS X's lack thereof lately. But the tides will change, and one day I'll probably be writing software using some awesome tools in an OS that hasn't been invented yet, by a future startup-turned-monopoly.
- sdegutis 13y agoHow are comments ordered? I thought it was the points you see, but this one has 4 points and [other] has 6 points (at time of writing), but [other] is below this one. Is it based on absolute number of upvotes (without subtracting downvotes)? [other]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146156
- roryokane 13y agoAs far as I can tell, it’s based on a combination of upvotes and time since posting. New comments start at the top of their tree and, as time passes, settle into where they would be if sorted by upvotes. So yours is above the other one because it’s more recent, but in a week, if the upvotes don’t change, the other one will be on top. It’s probably a similar algorithm to Reddit’s published “hot” algorithm (http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588 http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588).
- OlivierLi 13y agoOSes are complicated and gigantic engineering projects. Some of them are most definitely better than others in some respects. Saying that they are all absolutely equal is like declaring every CPU ever designed completely equal. It's true that most users will be well served by most OSes but that's more a statement about users than about OSes.
- sdegutis 13y agoI think statements like this pay too much attention to implementation details. Their whole point of software is to serve the users, so when we (the users) are able to accomplish our tasks with it, it's good enough. And I don't see very many important tasks that one OS can accomplish better than another.
- OlivierLi 13y agoI'm right there with you when talking about web programming and the likes. My main interests are system and games programming though so there might be a case of different points of views here. I'm just imagining a situation where someone needs their OS to be realtime for example. They're not going to be swayed by the "All options are equal when seen from afar" argument.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- OlivierLi 13y agoI think we might not be on the same page as to what Real-time means : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system
- sp332 13y agoWell, process and thread scheduling can make a very noticeable difference. Years ago, a few guys decided to revamp the Linux kernel's "good enough" thread scheduler into an actually nice one. The first iteration could handle creating and destroy 100,000 threads in 3 seconds on a box that used to take hours. Lately there have been benchmarks relating to interactivity of desktop programs, timing how long it takes for a program to respond to input. This varies dramatically depending on what priorities the kernel gives to various processes (when under load). Implementation details can make a difference in how nice a system is to use.
- sdegutis 13y agoI'd love it if instead of down-voting this, we could actually discuss where you disagree. I've been known to be wrong about things, so enlighten me.
- dijit 13y agoOperating systems are intrinsically different for many reasons. I don't know first hand, but I'm guessing the scheduler would be largely different, as is the security methodology- heck I can't imagine much similar except 'code runs here, os makes sure code runs' I remember my friend (a low level engineer at nokia) talking to be about windows 3.1 and how Microsoft put the GUI directly in the kernel because it was too slow otherwise, he went on to elude most of the security issues with windows were based on that. also, when it comes to remote management and headless machines, the unix-like family rule the roost.
- jodrellblank 13y agoalso, when it comes to remote management and headless machines, the unix-like family rule the roost. Maybe. I bet remote management of desktops with Group Policy, and a whole slew of Microsoft and 3rd party management services, is more common in Windows-land. In headless server terms, you've been able to install and run headless Windows Server for years now. It won't be as common because it hasn't been around as long, but it's certainly possible now. And in remote management on the server side, Server Manager shows other servers in your organization (by default?) in Windows Server 2012, and PowerShell was designed with remoting support since its inception. And WMI and Remote Desktop for server administration both should count as well, having being in Windows for many many years. The most popular 'remote management' thing missing from Windows is SSH, which seems a bit of a deliberately biased way to look at things. If you work in a Windows environment, there are plenty of ways to remotely manage your servers/services.
- dijit 13y agoI simply said it ruled the roost, you can't doubt the ubiquitousness of headless unix machines running ssh or simple config management programs (and /no/ means of direct remote management). I don't doubt that such things are possible in windows land, I feel most programming these days is so far removed from the kernel and how it handles the hardware that it's much of a muchness to decide what you'll use. the lack of licenses certainly help with linux things if you're not in need of support though.
- leobelle 13y ago> operating systems are just operating systems There is zero information in your epiphany. You can say this about anything and it will have as little meaning. Cars are just cars. Movies are just movies. The only thing that has any value is the "different and not better" and that involves a subjective "better" which doesn't apply uniformly across people. Ultimately useful measures can be based on time and money, for example productivity, deploy speed, licensing expenses, etc. Personally I hate the click and point everything UI in windows and prefer a sane bash like terminal with familiar unix tools, but that's entirely subjective.
- sdegutis 13y ago> There is zero information in your epiphany. You can say this about anything and it will have as little meaning. Cars are just cars. Movies are just movies. The only thing that has any value is the "different and not better" and that involves a subjective "better" which doesn't apply uniformly across people. Ultimately useful measures can be based on time and money, for example productivity, deploy speed, licensing expenses, etc. I thought my meaning was clear. Maybe it's not to you, but it sounds like you did understand it, and just don't agree with how I presented it. And that's fine. > Personally I hate the click and point everything UI in windows and prefer a sane bash like terminal with familiar unix tools, but that's entirely subjective. I went from Windows to Linux for the WMs, and stayed for the CLI. Then I went to Mac OS X and stayed for the trackpad. Then I went to emacs and stayed for the keyboard. Now I'm using Windows 8 and am considering staying for the beauty. Honestly, I don't put much stock even in my own subjective opinions anymore, since they change by the month.
- leobelle 13y ago> Honestly, I don't put much stock even in my own subjective opinions anymore, since they change by the month. Mine too. Weird how that works. Having a super strong opinion one day and experiencing a complete reversal sometime later.
- FireBeyond 13y agoThere's about the same information in the parent comment, "StackOverflow runs on Windows, really?" - like the premise is absurd, but with no reasoning made.
- coryfklein 13y agoFor me, I live a sort of double life with respect to this issue. For work, I feel most productive in Linux. For home, I absolutely cannot stand using anything but Mac OS X. If I worked for a company that used a Windows stack, I wouldn't have a problem working in Windows, but there's a huge difference in the end user experience depending on whether you're building a web stack or organizing a photo collection.
- Thaxll 13y agoWell, on the server side Linux is better than Windows, price, speed, tunning, customization ... It'a a no match.
- sdegutis 13y agoNot necessarily. Depends on who it is and what the project is. For someone who knows Windows better, the cost of MS software may outweigh the cost of hiring someone to do the same thing in Linux, or learning it themselves.
- couradical 13y agoI think that might be an oversimplification, certainly when looking at all of the costs (labor, management tools, environment, etc.) They're different operating systems, and they each have different strengths. I run both Windows and Linux servers, and there are some things that Windows handles better, and some that Linux does.
- stephenhuey 13y agoA decade ago, a database consultant told us a story of helping a bank who was seeing their 3 MS SQL Server databases (on Windows servers) go down every single day. He replaced their setup with Oracle and their problems went away. In telling us stories of why he preferred Linux he described how he had set up and managed databases on a hundred Linux servers for a major oil company and they were humming along without a problem, easy to manage, and in contrast he dreaded Windows servers due to memory leaks and whatnot. Anecdotal, I know, but I heard a lot of stories like that a decade ago. I've also heard a lot of stories since then about Windows servers getting better. And I've had to administer each a little bit here and there, and I have to agree with the other commenters that you can't generalize about which is better because it really depends on what you're doing with the servers. But some of those stories from many years ago scared away quite a few people from Windows servers and they'd probably appreciate hearing how Stack Overflow is succeeding with the current generation.
- jodrellblank 13y agoAgreed. Windows costs a fraction of a single admin's monthly salary - cheap at twice the price - and comes with a selection of fast to install powerful software with built in GUIs for customizing it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- justathrow2k 13y agoPeople are still surprised that people write software that runs on Windows, really?
- acchow 13y agoMoving on from Windows is taking longer than we thought, but will happen a lot sooner than you think. Most new applications live in the browser (even MS Office and Intuit Quickbooks) or on your smartphone/tablet.
- justathrow2k 13y agoShrug. No rush from my side of the room. I have found developing Windows application and web apps on the MVC .Net stack to be quite enjoyable.
- loudmax 13y agoWill the servers be running Mono instead of .Net, or are parts of the site being rewritten in a different language? What about the databases?
- dijit 13y agoI'm a unix fanboy, but I hear MSSQL is best in class, comparable with postgresql and maybe contending with oracle a little.
- jodrellblank 13y agoTo say the new MS Office lives in the browser is a bit of an overstatement. There is some support in SkyDrive and SharePoint for opening Office documents in-browser, (in some cases, I think requiring Internet Explorer), but it's feature limited. Office 2013 is very much a Windows Desktop program. And now a Windows RT App, too.
- acchow 13y agoHow about Office 365?
- toddan 13y agoAnd what wrong with that? The site is scaling extremely good and for a long time the whole application was running on only two servers.
- TacticalCoder 13y agoSO / SE is one of the posterchild of C# / .Net. However at the beginning they were really Windows only while now there's really a lot of Linux in there. HAProxy running on Linux, for example. There was a recent post about the various technologies using by the entire stack and there have also been SO/SE employees detailing the stack here on HN. So it depends what you mean by "runs on Windows". Certainly the scalability issues are handled, at least in part, by Linux.
- kops 13y agoOh man!!!! How will you sleep tonight ;-?
- jonhmchan 13y agoYep - it's incredibly performant. As I mentioned in the post, I was pleasantly surprised having been a die-hard python/mongo/os x/etc developer.
- tim333 13y agoQuite a lot here on why Stackoverflow is on windows http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html