Great read. It reminded me of a talk I attended in Amsterdam by Mark Russinovich.

Windows and Linux: A Tale of Two Kernels - Tech-Ed 2004

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HdV9QuvgS_w

Great article… but no mention of one of NT’s best features: completion ports! It ties together all the best features of the NT kernel and makes writing performant multi-threaded I/O applications (especially socket servers) a delight. The thread pool APIs introduced in Vista (which use completion ports under the hood) were also a sublime addition. https://pyparallel.org was possible to hack into existence over the course of about 3 months thanks to all these powerful primitives.

I have heard that the 2nd edition of Inside Windows NT is much more informative than the 1st.

Microsoft never built the cheap, CLI-only version of NT that would have given Linux a run for its money. It would have helped preserve some of the hacker mindshare they once had with DOS.

It does, and for reason I'm assuming many already know why. But if you weren't joking and were living under a rock. Look up the guy, Dave Cutler, who were mostly responsible putting together both.

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

Youtube has many of his interviews. The Computer History Museum (CHM) two part is perhaps most extensive. Links below to these.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVgSLud50ss

…which is still limited compared to IOCP. I’d love to be able to wait for locks, semaphores, etc. using uring. But no, even if you fall back to POSIX semaphores, the “everything is a file” paradigm has far too many asterisks to deliver on its promise.

Pop quiz: across all kinds of FDs (including block files, dirfds, sockets, signalfds, eventfds, lock descriptors, /proc files, tmpfs files, timerfds, and so on), which features of {select/epoll, io_uring, O_NOBLOCK, inotify/fanotify, etc.} are supported?

> Well, yes, it was designed and it also was a reimplementation of an existing thing, this being VMS.

My nitpick with the "reimplementation of VMS" statement would be that it didn't target source portability of VMS applications like Linux (and the GNU C library running on top of it) does with Unix/POSIX applications. I see it as Cutler and his team taking lessons learned from VMS and building something new incorporating those lessons in a different requirements framework.

oh, but a unix successor from bell labs is entirely real, it's called unix (v8+).

more seriously, it's called plan9.

> The no cost nature of Linux, as compared to the per-client client licensing for server versions of NT, can't be understated, though.

THIS, so much. One time (~1995 or so?) I bought a boxed SUSE Linux release. Pulled out the book, and practically on the 1st page, there was a copyright notice specifically allowing anyone to copy that book & pass it on. Whereas for practically every other book I'd had in my hands up to that point, copyright notices consisted of various "forbidden to do X, Y or Z" statements.

That right there convinced me I had something different, something special in my hands. Disclaimer: I had read about "open source" before, so I did know what I was looking at. But still it felt special.

Unsurprisingly: note the documentation linked to at the end of jmmv's Unix<->NT comparison above. They're ALL Amazon "buy this book" links. Over on the Linux/BSD side of the fence, such references are typically web pages, man pages, a free-download pdf or the like.

It's not the "free beer" aspect that got me over time. It's the "open", "sharing", "community project", versus "closed", "profit", "property of BigCorp Inc".

Indeed, Linux only became interesting to me on 1995's Summer, because getting that Linux Unleashed book with Slackware 2.0 CD was the route to easier homework assignments.

I had no way to do proper POSIX development at home with the Windows NT limitations, and access to the university labs running a mix of DG/UX and Solaris servers was rather limited.