Comment by sidewndr46
2 days ago
Some of this reads like parody, for example: "Cutler’s intent was to produce a system with the same level of quality, unshakable reliability, and attention to detail he was famous for in his work on VMS and NT."
I'm not really here to take shots at Dave Cutler, but Windows NT was not known for it's unshakeable reliability. If it's known for anything, it is known for lacking any basic security measures. I remember demonstrating to people who joined my WiFi network that I could automatically obtain remote shells on their laptop.
> I'm not really here to take shots at Dave Cutler, but Windows NT was not known for it's unshakeable reliability.
NT itself (the kernel and native mode APIs) is pretty well designed and implemented, in my opinion. I know there were findings from fuzzing kernel and native mode APIs in early versions of NT, but by about the Windows 2000-era it was pretty solid.
Win32 and the grown-up mess of APIs around it I'm less enthused with. NT itself is very impressive to me.
My fever-dream OS is an NT kernel with a modern and updated Interix subsystem as the main subsystem, with Win32 as a compatibility layer.