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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this kind of thing is the reason why Windows is in a death spiral that it probably won't get out of.

Microsoft has had many chances to introduce clean new APIs: for instance, .NET could have been built on top of a simpler platform, or Metro could have been an opportunity to take out some cruft.

In the end Metro breaks everything (if you think the median programmer could write non-trivial apps with asynchronous I/O, think again.) Amazingly, Metro almost feels like a tablet operating system when it is running on top of the line hardware, but the ultimate attack on latency is to remove things from the stack and not to add them.

Personally I think Windows today (even Win 8) beats the pants off Linux and MacOS as a GUI operating system, but I seriously have to ask questions such as "will Intel be making new x86-compatible processors 10 years from now?" when I see Microsoft and Intel consistently painting themselves in a corner.

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Yup. Each version of the .NET framework makes developers go through a cycle of excitement and disappointment when they find out that (1) there's all these neat new awesome libraries, but (2) the new libs take weeks to properly understand and (3) are just as baroque and poorly-thought-out as their predecessors, but in completely new ways and (4) the old ones will never be fixed and are effectively deprecated (but nobody formally admits it).

So many opportunities to settle down the MS development ecosystem into something sensible and consistent... so many pathetic missteps. Linq2SQL getting deprecated almost as soon as it was launched, Click Once installers just being an unusable mess (and now they've killed the old-but-usable installer projects), the endless shuffle of GUI frameworks, etc.

So many talented people firing out projects that are almost good.

It shouldn't matter. NT was designed to be platform agnostic; it was written on the Intel i960, a long-forgotten RISC processor from Intel, by guys who had cut their teeth on VAX and Alpha, and was released on x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC. There was even a SPARC port which never saw general release. I was running SQL Server on NT on Alpha in '96 or thenabouts, and bloody quick it was too! Porting NT 7 (or whatever Windows 8 really is) to ARM or POWER or whatever is not going to be a big deal.

> Porting NT 7 (or whatever Windows 8 really is) to ARM or POWER or whatever is not going to be a big deal.

I'm uncertain they kept cross-platform systems running around (whereas I'm reasonably certain Apple has a full OSX running on ARM internally, as they had OSX/x86 long before they left POWER behind). Although NT was built to support a number of architectures, it's been almost 15 years since NT last ran on non-x86 systems (AlphaNT, the Alpha port of Windows 2000; MIPS and PPC had already been dropped by this time), that's a very long time, and more than enough for x86 dependencies to creep in.

On the other hand, WinRT is supposedly a full NT kernel on ARM, so...

Windows through Server 2008 ran on Itanium, so they've been fine with non-x86 at least up until that point.

The Itanium build continued through Server 2008 R2.

Thus, every version of Windows NT has been released on at least one non-x86 platform.

- NT 3.1-3.5: x86, Alpha, MIPS

- NT 4.0: x86, Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC

- 2000 through 2008 R2 (7.0): x86, Itanium

- 2012 (8.0): x86, ARM

2012 is actually NT 6.2 (as is Windows 8).

> 2012 is actually NT 6.2 (as is Windows 8).

Notice that I listed Windows Server 2008 R2 as 7.0 rather than as 6.1. And that I listed Windows 2000 as 2000, rather than as 5.0.

In other words, I was giving the equivalent workstation OS -- not the internal NT version number.

I think WinRT is evidence enough that Microsoft can build NT for other architectures if need be. I'm sure it wasn't as simple as typing "make" to get an ARM version of Windows, but it certainly didn't take them very long to do it either.

I would point out that NT is already running on ARM, it was demoed at one point recently prior to the launch of windows 8.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/building-windo...

I'm uncertain they kept cross-platform systems running around

WinRT is a full NT kernel on ARM so your statement is incorrect. Also, Windows runs on IA64 (Itanium).

With Visual Studio you can currently compile code for IA32, AMD64, IA64 and ARM.

NT is very well done in regard to cross-platform compatibility: all platform specific code is centralized in one location and if you need platform specific instruction, you must you the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL).

The trouble isn't that "Windows can't be ported to ARM, etc." but more that Intel and Microsoft have, together, been making consistently bad decisions for a long time.

For instance, I'd say the tablet experience is more defined by having an SSD than having a touch screen. The hybrid hard drive that has been pushed in the WinTel ecosystem (including ReadyBoost) is a joke.

Customers don't feel minimum latency, mean latency, or median latency. They feel maximum latency. An SSD reduces maximum latency, but half-baked caching schemes don't. Yes, they improve measurable things like boot time, but a quick boot is little solace when your web browser regularly locks up for 20 seconds. (Even if the machine could reboot faster than the time the browser is locked up)

If there was one fundamental tenant of the anti-customer corporate ideology it is "throughput computing", or, the idea that nine woman can produce a baby in one month.

Customers don't perceive throughput, they perceive latency. When you're stuck on the 405 going 5 mph you aren't going to be philosophical and multiply that 5 mph by the density of vehicles, you're going to feel like it's slow for me...

Had the Windows 8 requirements included "no HDD", people would be saying "Wow, Windows 8 is fast!", instead a touch screen adds $100 to the cost, as does the Windows license, so users get shortchanged on the fundamental performance of the machine when they are trying to hit a given price point.

> Had the Windows 8 requirements included "no HDD", people would be saying "Wow, Windows 8 is fast!"

That's really clever. I was very underwhelmed by Windows 8 but I was moving from an SSD-only Windows 7 system, which are still relatively rare. If W8 black-desktoped on a system with less than 1000 IOPS on the system drive the way it does if you have an unsigned driver, there'd be a whole ecosystem of modern hardware and software that can assume fast storage IO opened up, with no backwards compatibility loss at all.

I had a netbook that I was planning to do wearable computing experiments with and the first thing I noticed was that the HDD would shut down if I had it in a backpack and moved faster than a slow walk.

The combination of moving from Win 7 starter to Win 8 (meaning remote desktop and all the goodies get unlocked) and going to an SSD has made it a really awesome machine. Win 8 really does get a lot out of an SSD, but if you hamstring your machine with an HDD or a "Hybrid" Hard Drive it doesn't matter how fast your CPU is if I/O makes the machine go out to lunch.

I have a netbook that has outlasted two macbooks. 1GB RAM, 1.6 GHz Atom processor, but it has an SSD... and I think the latter has proved to be the most important feature.

Technically, Cutler started NT on PRISM¹, an ancestor of Alpha, when it was still called Mica.

I've never heard of NT for the i960 before. Are you sure you don't mean the i860? Very different machines.

¹Not that one, this² one.

²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Prism

NT originally targeted the Intel i860 (just an emulator, at the time). Intel's codename for the i860 was "N10". Microsoft's "NT" name was an abbreviation of "N Ten".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Naming

That I can believe. Somehow the i860 fits well with Windows in my mind. Though nominally RISCy, it made the mistake later repeated by Itanium: high theoretical performance impossible to achieve in real programs (not to mention interrupt latency long enough for a vacation on Alpha Centauri).

The i960, on the other hand, had IMHO a great instruction set (even after losing the capabilities¹), with clean orthogonal 3-address instructions combined with programmer-friendly addressing modes.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_addressing

You are correct.

Better than that: The original NT design is from Dave Cutler, who designed a series of good-to-great OSes for DEC, including RSX-11M, VMS, and Mica, which never saw the light of day but was meant to be VMS-meets-Unix for the brand-new RISC chip DEC was making before it transmuted into Alpha (the chip, not the OS).

He's on the Xbox team now. He helped design the OS for Xbone, which, at this point, can't possibly tarnish his reputation that badly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

http://www.krsaborio.net/research/1990s/98/12_b.htm

Windows 8 already runs on ARM.

>In the end Metro breaks everything

Does it actually break anything? In the sense that programs written 10 years ago don't work.

The Windows backwards compatibility model includes a lot more than just old binaries continuing to run. To a substantial extent you can take code written for 16-bit windows and recompile it in 64-bit mode, intermixing it with code targeted at the latest version of Windows.

"will Intel be making new x86-compatible processors 10 years from now?"

I currently have in my hand an ARM tablet running Windows 8.

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