ReactOS, a 17-year quest for an open-source Windows, has a new release candidate

Re:ReactOS, a 17-year quest for an open-source Windows, has ... by skissane on Thursday December 17, 2015 @01:21AM (#10749927)

> From my perspective, Windows is an inferior system to any UNIX-based system on almost every front.

The core architecture of Windows NT is actually pretty nice. Its chief architect, Dave Cutler, was one of the lead developers of VMS. I think Windows NT and VMS do IO much better than Unix/Linux - making the basic primitives asynchronous, and layering synchronous IO on top, instead of asynchronous IO being a fragile afterthought. However, Microsoft has (no doubt forced by backward compatibility) layered a lot of less than pleasant legacy cruft on top of this nice core.

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Re:ReactOS, a 17-year quest for an open-source Windows, has ... by aangjie on Thursday December 17, 2015 @02:59AM (#10750186)

That's an interesting point you make. I've not digged into NT, but is there some fork of linux that provides the same. I can think of GNU Mach, being a case of taking that to the extreme end (i.e: micro services making together a kernel).

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Re:ReactOS, a 17-year quest for an open-source Windows, has ... by skissane on Thursday December 17, 2015 @09:54PM (#10756318)

I don't think GNU Mach in itself provides any IO facilities, as opposed to other layers on top (e.g. GNU Hurd). (And neither is a fork of Linux.) I'm not particularly familiar with Hurd, but I had a quick look at the Hurd Reference Manual, and it looks to me like the primary IO primitives are synchronous, and there are a couple of additional calls which provide some asynch support. This is different from the NT/VMS approach, in which the primitives are asynch, and synch is implemented by combining an asynch IO call with a wait for completion.

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