385
this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
385 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2260 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Not garbage" seems like a low bar to overcome for a company with such long experience. ๐
Long experience of producing garbage code...
What makes it garbage code? I mean, I don't like Windows due to the user experience, but I have zero insight into the code itself because it's proprietary closed-source and I've never worked at Microsoft.
I mean, there is actually leaked source code of Windows XP out there, because, you guessed it, they had a leak of that, too.
But I actually said "garbage code", because I didn't want to say that everything they've ever done is purely garbage. I didn't want to claim that I have particular insight into specifically their code.
I have to assume, though, that their code quality is garbage, because:
Lots of MS software is buggy. In particular, all those security issues are bugs, too.
They keep backwards-compatibility to just absurd degrees. To this day, you can't create a file that's called "aux", for example, because at some point, they had to block that to retrofit filesystem support into their OS.
At the very least, this is going to mean they'll have tons of such workarounds and gotchas, which will make it difficult for new devs, but also offer more surface area for bugs/vulnerabilities.
Well, and then there's some urban legends. For example, I've heard that the entirety of Windows is in one giant monorepo. I just quickly peaked into a supposed copy of the Windows XP leak and that did look the part...
All software is buggy ๐
But yeah, keeping backwards compatibility does tend to open a lot of bug surfaces, like you say. Though IMO that's due to the decision to do so, rather than the code itself. I'm sure they do their best with the corporate decisions to which they have to adhere. But you probably didn't mean they are bad coders, merely that the end product becomes buggy, I suppose. ๐
Yet here we are... ๐