zaval wrote:In reality, Windows is the most efficiently implemented general purpose OS I have been faced with.
I'm sorely tempted to say that this is because you're too young to have known any actually efficient operating systems, but then, the same applies to me, too. Note that the ones I have in mind as being efficient designs - such as ITS, Tenex, and TOPS-20 - are long since gone. So much for efficiency being a major factor in success.
Unix never really was one of them; it was merely so lightweight and minimalist in its early days that it could squeeze onto inexpensive systems such as the PDP-11, at the cost of not being able to do anything much with it except teach programming classes.
Besides, and efficiency and clarity of design are generally at odds, rather than complementary. There are exceptions to this rule, but far too few.
As for Windows, many of the knocks against it are due to historical and pragmatic issues rather than design or implementation flaws; many of the same have held for systems such as Mac System (prior to OS X), despite that starting out as a genuinely efficient system in several ways (albeit an overburdened and unstable one) with the remarkable work done by Hertzfeld on the ROM Toolbox and the frankly insane ways that they tuned and tweaked things such as sound generation and video timing on the 128K Macintosh. Linux has plenty such problems, too, but really, hype to the contrary, its primary niche is a very different one anyway (with the overwhelming majority of installed systems being either mobile devices or servers, mainly for economic rather than technical reasons - though portability across architectures, and fine-grained tuneability for HPC requirements,
are a big part of it).
Many of the problems which have plagued Windows - quite a few of which no longer do - came from trying to blend four radically different OS designs (CP/M by way of MS-DOS with the original Windows as an add-on, bits of UNIX mixed in from MS-DOS 2.0 onwards, OS/2 as developed when MS and Big Blue were still working together, and the glorified re-write of VMS which became Windows NT) into a coherent whole as they moved from the 9x kernel to the XP kernel, all while trying to maintain compatibility with programs dating back upwards of 20 years written with the assumption that they could access the hardware directly any way they chose.
That, and the utterly blase attitude which the consumer market in general holds towards such things as stability and security, again for reasons having nothing to do with technology and everything to do with cost and convenience. In this, Microsoft was just giving their customers what they wanted, regardless of whether it was what they needed or not. They are hardly alone in this; IMAO, it is little short of criminal that registered ECC didn't become the standard for system memory from the day it was introduced, but raw speed and low cost are apparently much better selling points for Intel than actually staying stable enough to finish what you were doing without crashing.
Further, Microsoft's perennial excuse that third party drivers are often at fault is not entirely without merit, though it was a lot more true before Microsoft introduced a certification process for hardware vendors who wanted Microsoft to give their customers the time of day on support issues. For a long time, Linux developers simply didn't support - or feel a need to support, since 'you can always write your own driver' - the breadth and variety of hardware which Windows did, which made it significantly easier to make the kernel stable for the hardware it would run on. Similarly, the kernel team only needed to provide a basic level of support for a family of platforms - x86, x86-64, ARM, MIPS - and leave the rest of the work adapting it to, say, a new SBC or smartphone onto the hardware vendors and their consumer supporters.
Finally, the sheer size of the installed base for Windows has made it a bigger target for those looking to attack, undermine, or compromise the system for their own gain. If one looks at the places where Linux derivatives are dominant - such as Android devices - one soon sees that many of the same problems which plague Windows affect them just as badly.
That having been said, I am in no mood to defend
any of the existing operating systems, as they are all fundamentally and catastrophically bad. Unfortunately, they also are catastrophes which we are stuck with for the foreseeable future, and no one here is likely to change that fact.
I made lots of .exe loader prototypes, now finishing ACPI parser and will finally implement public version of .exe loader.
)
but actually to simplify future back-port to Hexa, my another complicated project - a systems programmering language.
I already have some devs who help me to design the kernel.
This all reminds me of the cream soda computer I read about once.
at once. what makes windows slow is its compalibility with older softwares and hardwares. i like what you are doing, and i would use it when it got stable. good luck.
