Comment by LatencyKills

> 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.