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>I cherish Microsoft for its work in Windows, it is the only mainstream OS that can save us from UNIX monoculture. What is Windows doing differently than UNIX

• pjmlp 12y ago
  - Moving their kernel to C++ - Exposing an OO ABI (COM, WinRT) - Moving beyond C for systems programming (C++, .NET Native, Sing#) - Experimenting with new OS architectures (Singularity, Drawbridge) - Continue the multimedia OS culture of Atari ST, Amiga systems
  • gillianseed 12y ago
    >Moving their kernel to C++ Not sure this matters given the extreme low-level nature of kernel and driver coding. Certainly not enough to warrant a rewrite, which I guess is a result of Microsoft more or less dropping support for modern C in their compiler by not even supporting C99 fully. >Experimenting with new OS architectures Certainly Singularity was an interesting experiment, sadly and typical of Microsoft mentality, once they ruled it out for production use and passed it off for others to play with, they chose to do so under such a restrictive license (shared source) that no one will do something interesting with it. As for drawbridge, the same ideas regarding sandboxing are being worked on in the Linux camp, and from what I understand also in solutions like Capsicum on FreeBSD, from the looks of it, *NIX is way ahead of Microsoft in this area. >Continue the multimedia OS culture of Atari ST, Amiga systems Not sure what you mean here unless you are talking about coming with a GUI out-of-the-box ? Your typical current Linux distro is more of a 'multimedia OS' than Atari ST or Amiga ever was (owned them both), which includes BeOS, the one which actually carried that moniker.