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Comment by smithjchris | Hacker News Reader

This is the typical example where Linux suffers from lack of true engineering. The kernel API and libs should be stable, predictable and well documented. There should be no hacks to support odd behaviour because odd behaviour should not be specified. Isn't that why we have POSIX?

What with recent issues with egotistical libc maintainers, people throwing their pacifiers over having to support junk, people moaning about ext4 (even though it works fine and is poor app behaviour), it doesn't give people much confidence.

Confidence is key.

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> The kernel API and libs should be stable, predictable and well documented. There should be no hacks to support odd behaviour because odd behaviour should not be specified.

There should be a pony too.

How can the kernel not have lots of hacks? It deals with hardware, which is often weird.

NetBSD comes with a Pony :)

POSIX rarely changes. They should start there and work backwards.

UNIX nearly died because vendors wouldn't allow interoperability. Don't let it happen again.

Look at Win32 - still works like it did back in '91 (with Win16).

Certainly you understand why Win32 still runs old Windows 3.1 code from 1991? It does so because of countless little hacks and "compatabilty mode" switches in the OS that emulate old bugs that existed in old versions that badly behaved software was taking advantage of.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

That's a good overview of how much "Maintaining weird legacy bug-compatibility code" you need in an OS with any history whatsoever.

I have seen the win32 subsystem source (legitimately through shared source - I used to work for the British Ministry of Defence). It's very clean and tidy and not full of junk like that believe it or not.

The reason it still works is that they thought about it properly to start with. There have been very few extensions. The main one being adjusting pointer sizes (which are hidden behind a typedef like LPSTR anyway so that is irrelevent).

And for the record I take anything Joel says with a pinch of salt. The guy is a trendy blog mouth piece.

In that case, I should have linked you directly to the Raymond Chen articles that Joel was paraphrasing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/15/55296.a... http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481.a...

Here's a quote:

This is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to application compatibility. I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.

Windows 95 and Windows NT are not the same thing.

Precisely. I forget that the 9x series of operating systems existed sometimes!

I've seen dozens of those "personal failures." :-)

Granted, backwards ABI compatibility is a huge, complicated, thankless task for which you get no notice if you do the job perfectly. The ideal spot for the "break old programs" vs. "cripple new programs to avoid breaking old ones" dial is different for every project. Sometimes the right thing to do is keep the code base from degenerating into a pile of back-hacks. Sometimes it's all about bending over backwards to keep a long-gone vendor's bug from biting your end users.

Windows 9x was a mess. That same is not true with NT which is really nicely put together.

I've dragged some stuff which we wrote for NT4, recompiled it with VC++ 2008 (plus spent some time frigging VS settings) and it just worked on Win2k8. The original binaries, even though they were compiled 12 years ago, still run on Win2k3 fine and past the test suite (!).

It sounds like your default state is "Full Confidence", and so Confidence is 'eaten away' in your description

The better definition concerning Linux is that Confidence is "Built Up". Linux started as an unknown and has forced itself into people's confidence.

Linux operates well 24x7x365 in many places, and that rate of Confidence build up is way more than any rate of loss due to Steering Committee squabbles.

If Linux had its API frozen in 1991 there would be very little use for it now. Sometimes you have to change things to move on.

Read this from end to end:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms632680%28VS.85%29....

Unchanged since 27 July 1993. Used trillions of times a day by millions/billions of computers.

Except that you are wrong, since the call includes special cases for Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP.

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