[Karunamon]

I recall reading somewhere (can't find it for beans now) that the Windows kernel was a huge mess codewise since many of the original developers have moved on and poor to nonexistent documentation was left, meaning that the modern employees had to basically reverse engineer a lot of the code.

Take this with a grain of salt, of course.

[happycube]

There's been a rather effective cleanup effort a few years ago: http://windows-now.com/blogs/robert/mark-russinovich-explain...

[ocdtrekkie]

This isn't super unusual for very old code.

[mlvljr]

Here are some comments from the times of the source code leak:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

I'd say, the user experience has improved since then overall (meaning the code quality, too, in one of the most practical senses).

[UK-AL]

Somebody did an actual anaysis of that leak, and the code was considered high quality overall.

You get dodgy comments in the Linux kernel to.