Comment by meheleventyone
9 months ago
A lot of big projects have amazing longevity to their older architectural decisions. Unreal still has a lot of stuff in it people that used UE1 would recognize, I did most of my professional development on UE3 and a bunch of that is still pretty recognizable. Similarly Chrome is a product of the time it was first created. And looking into the Windows source is probably like staring into the stygian abyss.
There is a lot of legacy and tech debt out there!
I remember years back someone form Microsoft calling the windows code base "The Abyss" because of how much technical legacy there was in it.
I think it was Steve Gibson who said that the Windows code base had some very questionable things in it. For instance they had work experience high school students working on code that made it into the final build that was less than spectacular. Like how Windows used to stall when you put a CD in and wouldn't proceed until the disc spun up and started reading data.
Windows 11 probably would still do that but I don't know because I don't have a disc drive any more.
It wasn't really windows lagging, it was explorer. There used to be more things in explorer that were blocked on something ultimately blocked by I/O.
This tends to not be the case so much any more, so I doubt it would happen today.
Instead you get the dreaded "Working on it....". It seem's like hard drives can be just as slow to spin up these days as CDs were back in the day.
Damn I forgot about explorer hanging when you put a CD in. That was especially terrible when you didn't have DMA