Comment by kjellsbells
14 hours ago
One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus.
I mean, Chen has decades of winternals in his head. Microsoft has been gutting their staff for years now. When the Petzold/Chen generation hang up their spurs, does Microsoft still have a critical mass of people who understand Windows from the metal up?
> One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus.
A similar "brain drain" has occurred in macOS (formerly known as OS-X) over the years, as evident in man page documentation for "newer" daemons shipped. An easy way to verify this is to run:
And compare the man pages for the daemons running with the man page for `launchd`.
While this exercise is illuminating, it is also depressing IMHO.
> formerly known as OS-X
It was never OS-X, it was OS X, and originally Mac OS X, as in the one after Mac OS 9. The Mac prefix was dropped with Lion (10.7). The Mac OS lingo having itself been introduced with 7.6, before that the OS core was called System.
And the documentation, now it is mostly generated, the famous Apple books are now gone, at least the archive is still available.
Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess?
Microsoft new blood has been educated on Macs and ChromeOS, even if they do games it is most likely consoles.
On WinUI community calls you usually would get puzzled faces when the Q&A touched when would WinUI be able to do "insert basic Win32/Forms/WPF" feature.
Management apparently doesn't care they actually understand Windows, or get the required trainings to meet the quality of their predecessors.
That is how you get Webview2 all over the place.
>Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess?
There have been some writings and posts here about Microsoft. Here is one from last spring, from a guy that was long time Windows core developer and moved to Azure group. It's well worth reading, what he writes about challenges they have had and most likely still have if not even worse now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
And from what I've understood old chaps like Dave Cutler are involved much less than they were for a very long time.
I have read that, yeah it also shows a lot how things changed.
As per his interview on Dave's Garage, besides being of an age where he really doesn't need to work, at the time he was involved on getting Linux running on XBox on Azure, apparently Microsoft uses idle consoles from XBox Cloud for AI.
https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?t=10743
i fear the times when the chip makers change their architectures and the OS makers have to change the inner working of their OSes but then again, I guess there is an equivalent in the chip-making industry as well
As someone within that age group who moved back to Windows for development and entertainment, I find systems programming on Windows more fun and engaging than on competition OSs.
Oddly enough the open-source nature of the latter kind of takes away some of the thrill. Eerything is just... there, whereas with Windows there's always quite a bit of digging and investigation involved. Or maybe this is Stockholm syndrome; I dunno.
Funny feelings in my tummy reading this! I worked with winapi back in late 2000s to early 2010s and I remember having some great fun with it. Although there was MFC and WPF I didn't want to learn them because I wanted the fastest & leanest (catch the reference :) executable I could get; I'd then run gnu strip over the .exe too.
Stack Overflow was essential to figure out arcane flags that could solve my issues (when even MSDN, another great site with its examples, couldn't) and Raymond was very present in SO at that time, iirc he replied to one of my questions too. That's when I found his blog, always great reads!
Now I've been a 14-year Linux user and none of the toolkits and libraries give anything close to the winapi experience.
> fastest & leanest
Surely you mean leanest and meanest :P
I'd also say that tooling on Windows is simultaneously better and easier to use than on Linux; the noob case of green play button in an IDE is taken care of, but if you want detailed performance and memory profiling, record-replay debugging, hot-reload, all of this is straightforwardly available on Windows.
I was a dev on the Visual Studio and Windows teams in the 90s. I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities.
I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger.
I’m not being critical; they are just focused on higher level abstractions.
It’s fun to understand just for intellectual curiosity’s sake but the number of people who get to work on shipping code where ring-0 knowledge is useful has to be minuscule as a percentage. It feels like a minor miracle I got to work on device drivers in my career. I imagine students might be more worried about completing assignments and good grades than the ins and outs of debuggers, too, though understanding those is important for problems one is more likely to come across in work projects versus smaller school assignments.
> the number of people who get to work on shipping code where ring-0 knowledge is useful has to be minuscule as a percentage
I wonder if it it is more that the percentage of people who choose to dedicate themselves to that type of work is miniscule. I work in graphics and performance, and it seems similar.
Few people really work on it specifically at any given company, and I've heard people warn others that there are few jobs in it.
But video game companies really want people for those roles and will pay well because they're hard to find. Still, few programmers show any interest in specializing in those skills. If you're passionate about it and willing to learn the details you'll eventually find a lot of job opportunities. I know people who want to work with this and do so - I know many more who have specifically said they want to stay away from it. I don't know anyone who wants to and can't.
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> I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities.
> I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger.
I know quite a lot of such people (even in student age) who are interested in such topics. I really have a feeling that you chose the wrong students at the wrong universities.
Evidence for my point: rather recently, No Starch Press published quite a lot of about such topics - I am rather certain that a publisher knows quite well which kinds of books do or don't sell well at a given time:
- The Book of Debugging https://nostarch.com/book-of-debugging
- The Linux Memory Manager https://nostarch.com/linux-memory-manager
- The Art of 64-Bit Assembly, Volume 2 https://nostarch.com/art-64-bit-assembly-v2
- The Ghidra Book, 2nd Edition https://nostarch.com/ghidra-book-2e
- Building a Debugger https://nostarch.com/building-a-debugger
- Microcontroller Exploits https://nostarch.com/microcontroller-exploits
- System Programming in Linux https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux
- The Art of ARM Assembly, Volume 1 https://nostarch.com/art-arm-assembly-volume-1
- Getting Started with FPGAs https://nostarch.com/gettingstartedwithfpgas
- The Book of I²C https://nostarch.com/book-i%C2%B2c
> System Programming in Linux https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux
Any ideas how this compares with Kerrisk's The Linux Programming Interface? I've only so much time to read one 1000+ page book...
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And for some books about Windows system programming:
- Windows Internals, Parts I and II
- Windows 10 System Programming, Parts I and II
- Windows Kernel Programming, Second Edition
- Programming Windows, 5th and 6th Editions
> you chose the wrong students at the wrong universities
I work with Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and Carnegie Mellon.
You don't know that "young engineers" are buying those books. I didn't claim that no one is interested in low-level development. My point is that most younger developers couldn't explain the difference between a mutex and a critical section, or how the OS handles a thread quantum, if their lives depended on it.
I could list a dozen new books on how to build an LLM from scratch. That doesn't mean that most developers understand LLM internals.
As an aside, I love your username. I have a tattoo of Aleph One. ;-)
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Arguably the lower level abstractions are more interesting too! how exactly Windows does ring-0 is less interesting than writing your own ring-0! And unless you care about writing driver-level software for Windows or contributing to the kernel, learning this is also less useful.
I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer.
> I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer.
Really? Understanding the cost of ring transitions is incredibly useful. I recently consulted with a company that was having horrible performance issues, and it came down to the fact that the primary developer didn't know that certain Win32 calls forced ring transitions. The entire fix was switching from a mutex to a critical section (one causes a ring transition, the other doesn't).
Treating the OS like an impenetrable black box will bite upcoming engineers/companies... eventually.
Speaking of debuggers...
I still twitch whenever someone says "use ddd" and they are not referring to Evans' seminal work.
:-D
> who can
Probably enough to keep Windows going, at least.
> and want to
Not if the pay or location is uncompetitive.
One trend to watch is AI cheat devices. Instead of running detectable software they have a fully separate device that uses AI for object detection and aimbotting. If cheaters move to using those, then the argument for kernel mode anticheat weakens. And that is the cornerstone keeping gamers on windows.
Now I'm looking forward to these AI cheat devices. It's going to be hilarious if the kernel anticheat malware finally gets killed by AI aimbots of all things.
The term "AI" used in video games is not really related to the current LLM craze.
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While I’m not sure if this is a bot (where did vidya enter the convo?), game hacking on both cheat and anticheat side has genuinely deep Windows internals knowledge (admittedly somewhat lopsided, but deep nonetheless)
Producer and consumer sides are tied. If there is strong demand for windows development then there will be money sloshing around which will attract devs. I predict demand will decrease, at least for this particular niche.
To go even further off topic, being called a bot is certainly a wake up call for me that the internet is dying, and I'm not ready for it, and need to reposition myself asap somehow.
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Why do you think that is not already happening within Microsoft?
Obviously it's Copilot /s
Maybe they'll just train Copilot on their code to help them.