From the get-go Windows NT (Win32) had a common model for overlapped IO (async IO in today's parlance). This async capability permeated everything from disk IO to network IO, and works well today with USB, Thunderbolt etc. Mind you, this model has not changed while Unix/Linux/POSIX still have not found a common model that works for all. See for instance https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13407542/is-there-really...

Under the hood Windows was also designed with a completion-oriented model (IO completion ports) which scales better in most instances than the Linux readiness-oriented approach (I believe that MacOS uses a completion approach as well, so the readiness approach is not universal *nix). Basically, windows saves at least one context switch for every basic IO operation. Windows supports the Berkeley sockets API with some optional extensions to make socket operations overlapped/async as well, essentially supporting both the straight socket model as well as the completion oriented extensions.

https://ss64.com/nt/syntax-redirection.html

And half the time you’d have to use the “for” cli monstrosity. I looked up the instructions every single time I used it for decades, that’s how bad it was/is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

This is definitely getting deep into the Windows world, and if you didn't do a lot of highly Windows focused software development its probably easy to miss it. COM is a big giant complicated beast and definitely not a complete darling to work with but it had (has?) a lot of really cool concepts. Very different from the everything is a stream of text basis in Linux. And even now with things like Powershell, you're not sending text to the things you're piping to, you're passing .NET objects around.

Can you elaborate? Do you mean performance? Because the on the C level both use (apart from some minor differences, which aren't enough to call one 'simply better' than the other) the same berkeley socket API.

I might have been too harsh on Windows there, I've never paid to do any direct socket-level programming within Windows.

The biggest annoyance with Windows sockets is that they aren't really unified with files - as in, a socket file descriptor cannot be passed to file APIs that work on FDs, like read() and write(); you have to use send/recv(). This makes it harder to write generic code in C, since you need an abstraction layer for code that deals with I/O streams. But most frameworks already offer such an abstraction layer - e.g. a .NET API would just use Stream (and if it's a socket, it would be a NetworkStream instance).

I have PowerShell, Git Shell and Cygwin running on my windows Dev box and all three make me cry on a weekly basis because I have to switch between them to do different things. I suppose one day I will sit down to fix my Windows dev environment, but it makes me feel so bloody frustrated that my muscle-memory shell is so ... perverted by windows implementations.

MS is bringing Bash to windows natively. I don't know how that is going to work since piping just isn't there, but I've got my fingers crossed that I'll only have to deal with ONE shell for windows!!!

It's not a native Bash experience but it's pretty close. I say "not native" because it's actually running a VM under the hood and bridging the file systems via 9P network protocol.

I know people who are using it and love it. I have not switched yet, but I am definitely going to investigate it at some point.

However, Linux admins who know networking usually have a deeper understanding.