And how much of it is actually needed? Considering only the actually useful parts of an OS, my impression is that Windows got saturated a long ago and the parts in later versions were just forced along in new versions due to reasons that have nothing to do with technological advance. My point is, ReactOS has only to become stable and reasonably good on real hardware to be successful. There is a lot of parts in the later Windows versions that only serve niches, thus being cruft for the bulk of users. Microsoft had to evolve this way due to its commercial nature, whereas ReactOS doesn't have to.
I don't get why people are pushing back on this point. It isn't a criticism of ReactOS. It's just a pragmatic result of writing a clone of another project that itself is constantly undergoing development.
This is why people more often talk about ReactOS being exciting in terms of supporting older software rather than new. Obviously if it ever got to the stage that it had parity with the latest releases of Windows then that would be amazing but the chances of that happening are miniscule.
I think this is where you're making wrong assumptions. ReactOS is free and open-source, and from this comes choice. Even if the main project chooses to work on reimplementing marginal or even unwanted things, a fork is always an option. (A fork from an immature project like it still is doesn't make sense for now.) After all, it's known that people don't appreciate bloat. ReactOS wants parity with Windows 2003 and that is a manageable target. Bits from later Windows versions may be added for important applications but it hasn't have to be nor is necessarily wanted all that Microsoft pushed from Vista hitherto. ReactOS doesn't have to cover all that much, really.
Also, an important nitpeek: ReactOS doesn't reverse-engineer. It employs clean-room engineering.
Yeah you're right it's not reverse engineering in the technical sense. It's a lazy term to use because it sounds like the approximation of the process even though it's technically inaccurate. I should get out of that habit. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT#/me...
* the HAL - there have been changes here, but nothing so fundamental that can't be built upon
* kernel mode drivers - these have changed and new models keep getting released by Microsoft, but these rely on well defined interfaces and a lot of it is in the kernel mode driver framework (KMDF). A detailed history can be found here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/hardware/drivers/wdf/kmdf...
The user mode driver framework is similar.
I'm not going to go through the rest of the subsystems, you might want to review this document:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160113113554/http://research.m...
So... sure, things have changed over the years but they most certainly aren't radical enough to stall development of ReactOS.
ReactOS has a target of Windows Server 2003. If they decide to upgrade to a later operating system, I'm not quite sure I see that as a huge issue.
There have also been massive changes to the way Windows handles networking and authentication protocols (Active directory, SMB, etc), changes to the the driver model, changes to the way POSIX support is handled, etc.
As much as you might dismiss some subsequent Microsoft technologies to be "not very successful", the fact remains that Microsoft are still always pushing new technologies and a not so insignificant number of developers do sometimes use these technologies which means, at some point, the ReactOS developers will either need to reverse engineer those technologies as well (assuming those libraries can't run natively on ReactOS already _and_ there's no legal restrictions preventing them from running on non-Microsoft endorsed platforms) or accept a lack of parity with Windows.