>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.
It's just as likely it would end up as an overengineered mess. And that's without considering backwards compatibility constraints, which are one of the biggest maintenance burdens.
> 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.
Context: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/statements/state-of-openss...
Surely they thought of it but didn't say it out loud... to keep it exploitable, maybe?
I've been linking a lot of stuff against boringssl during that time, I suppose...
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
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/c69b5af10a754051274e...
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.
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.
0. https://www.libressl.org/
A sad day. End of an era *salute*
i think a project like this would slough old architecture like mad and let major versions tick, but they forge on...
(Not a strange question given the recent PHP vulns found by AI.)