points by jmmv 2 days ago | 0 comments
I was curious about this a couple of years ago and ended up digging into the history of the NT design, comparing it to contemporary Unix systems, and writing this: https://jmmv.dev/2024/09/windows-nt-vs-unix-design.html . Pretty enlightening exercise.
[–] mvdwoord 2 days ago
[–] trentnelson 1 day ago
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.
[–] bananaflag 1 day ago
I have heard that the 2nd edition of Inside Windows NT is much more informative than the 1st.
Windows and Linux: A Tale of Two Kernels - Tech-Ed 2004
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HdV9QuvgS_w