I disagree strongly, but this is beside the point. Medical hardware should not be using any operating system that's not hard real-time and thoroughly vetted. Ideally they would use no OS at all. Even Linux, which is drastically more appropriate for embedded systems, is a questionable choice for medical equipment.
Please don't respond to inflammatory trollishness by making the thread still worse. It's hard to resist provocation, but important. The rest of your comment is fine and would have been more persuasive without the first bit.
No it's really not. I've used Windows and Linux a lot and in 10 years of using Linux I've only twice had a kernel panic while using non-experimental software.
On Windows I've had countless BSODs.
And as a point of comparison, I've had tons of kernel panics on MacOS over the years, for various reasons. Sometimes defective hardware, sometimes odd software interactions, and sometimes for reasons I can't explain.
Windows has a lot of problems. The kernel itself is not really one of them.
(That said, I still wouldn't use Windows on an embedded device, much less a life-critical one. Even using Linux would give me pause in this scenario.)
(And yes, the joke "but why would you ever exit emacs?" was said many times)
Almost every single BSOD today is a hardware/driver problem. After Server 2003, MSFT got serious about kernel stability. I haven't had a BSOD from a kernel problem since Vista.
Secondly, I also run multiple Server 2012 R2 servers with server hardware, and have never had a BSOD with any of those machines.
Finally, Microsoft runs Azure on Win Server, if it wasn't stable, it's cloud platform would be in serious trouble.
Disclaimer: I still work for Microsoft
It doesn't have to be unstable, just less stable than alternative kernels, according to the parent comment.
At our office we use Gitlab (hear me out), and one of the CTOs (yes, there were multiple) was a big fan of Github and not such a big fan of Gitlab. Every time Gitlab.com went down, he'd rub it my face. So obviously I tried to find out the reason – was it a software issue or a development issue? I hadn't even considered infrastructure issue – turns out, Gitlab was on Azure, and they were facing a lot of instability on their infrastucture. (To their credit, they were already evaluating other services to move off of Azure).
A cloud platform doesn't need to uber-stable to be profitable. They can provide good services, good tooling, good support etc. at the cost of small instability and still be good overall.
The Windows kernel is solid. If I disable the Nvidia drivers it never crashes.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.