>We do not fully understand the motivations that led to the public APIs and internal complexity we’ve described here. We’ve done our best to reverse engineer them by asking “what would motivate someone to do this” and often we’ve found ourselves coming up short.
Surely they thought of it but didn't say it out loud... to keep it exploitable, maybe?
I kinda wonder what if Microsoft (or any major software company) would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems, opposite of piling on new features. Will it result a much cleaner code, better architect, and stable product?
The last Windows I daily use was Windows 7 Home (same era with Windows Server 2008). The newer ones don't really improved much featurely from my (user) point of view, and from what I've heard, it's getting more sloppyer every newer version.
> what if Microsoft would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems
They wouldn't, even if they didn't care about shipping new features. The technical complexity inside Windows/Office/old core MS offerings arises only in small part from ordinary tech debt--that is, things fixable without changing observable behavior. The lion's share of that complexity is because of Microsoft's priority to avoid breaking compatibility (backwards, or with hardware/software combos that work) at all costs.
That means that a refactor-only decade would achieve little unless that compatibility priority were changed.
Make you wonder what they've been testing this on. Even NetBSD doesn't have a recent release for Itanium. Crazy that you can run NetBSD 11.0 on HPPA, but not Itanium, given that HPPA is in some sense the pre-cursor to Itanium.
I don't see "we fixed some of the the excessive performance regressions that we introduced in 3.0". Unfortunate...
Context: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/statements/state-of-openss...
>We do not fully understand the motivations that led to the public APIs and internal complexity we’ve described here. We’ve done our best to reverse engineer them by asking “what would motivate someone to do this” and often we’ve found ourselves coming up short.
Surely they thought of it but didn't say it out loud... to keep it exploitable, maybe?
> Dropped Windows-on-Itanium (VC-WIN64I) and Windows CE (VC-CE) targets from Configurations.
What a throwback. afaik Windows Server 2008 R2 had Itanium updates until 2020 and paid support until this year. Pretty good run to say at least
I kinda wonder what if Microsoft (or any major software company) would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems, opposite of piling on new features. Will it result a much cleaner code, better architect, and stable product?
The last Windows I daily use was Windows 7 Home (same era with Windows Server 2008). The newer ones don't really improved much featurely from my (user) point of view, and from what I've heard, it's getting more sloppyer every newer version.
> what if Microsoft would give their engineers a few decades of time just to refactor their existing systems
They wouldn't, even if they didn't care about shipping new features. The technical complexity inside Windows/Office/old core MS offerings arises only in small part from ordinary tech debt--that is, things fixable without changing observable behavior. The lion's share of that complexity is because of Microsoft's priority to avoid breaking compatibility (backwards, or with hardware/software combos that work) at all costs.
That means that a refactor-only decade would achieve little unless that compatibility priority were changed.
This will NOT please the shareholders. And that's all that matters.
Make you wonder what they've been testing this on. Even NetBSD doesn't have a recent release for Itanium. Crazy that you can run NetBSD 11.0 on HPPA, but not Itanium, given that HPPA is in some sense the pre-cursor to Itanium.
Age is probably less relevant than current installed base/active users
More than likely in "government"; they are always behind and keeping legacy stuff around. I found Windows 1.0 floppies in a drawer, back-in-the-day.
Honestly more HPPA gear to test against than Itanium
Mandatory reminder libressl[0] exists.
0. https://www.libressl.org/
> Dropped Windows-on-Itanium
A sad day. End of an era *salute*
seems like a versioning-induced death
i think a project like this would slough old architecture like mad and let major versions tick, but they forge on...
MS ended paid extended support for Itanium, so it's kind of a dead target
Was it verified by AI?
(Not a strange question given the recent PHP vulns found by AI.)