[deprave]

A lot of Microsoft APIs and subsystems are similarly bloated. There are probably tons of factors at play, but I believe being closed-source and having to support many individual use cases is one fundamental reason. (See for example CreateProcess vs. fork...)

[bitwize]

When it comes to system call interfaces, it's because Dave Cutler has forgotten more than many modern "kernel hackers" will ever know about how to design an OS.

[deprave]

I appreciate the name-dropping.

Dave Cutler's skills aside, Unix predates Windows by decades, and to anyone remotely familiar with kernel development it is clear that the sheer quantity and complexity of subsystems stem from the fact that nobody but Microsoft can actually see, modify, and redistribute Windows' source code.

Unless you can actually say "here's why Windows is qualitatively better" and point out specific tasks Windows does better, I'll just point you to the fact that the internet infrastructure and most of the servers on it, along with every Apple desktop and pretty much every mobile device, run Unix.

[pjmlp]

> I'll just point you to the fact that the internet infrastructure and most of the servers on it, along with every Apple desktop and pretty much every mobile device, run Unix.

I wonder how much of the internet infrastructure would run Unix if free (as in beer) clones like *BSD and GNU/Linux did not exist in first place.

How much internet infrastructure would run actually Unix if ISPs had to choose between Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Digital UX, Tru64 and Windows licenses?

Free is always more valued than quality.

[kelnos]

I'd guess that, even more important than the cost, up until recently, interacting with Windows in a headless mode was next to useless. Most sysadmins in my experience avoid GUIs like the plague when managing servers.

[jamespo]

Are you too young to remember "the network is the computer"?

And of course this worked in reverse, when Netscape released their commercial webserver Microsoft rushed to give away IIS.

[pjmlp]

I started coding in the 80's and I remember how the UNIX market was afraid of Windows NT workstations, before they actually started losing market share to the free (beer) UNIX versions in form of BSD and GNU/Linux.

[umanwizard]

Why is it valid to conflate every kernel that runs a *nix OS together under "Unix"? Is there any meaningful overarching "Unixy" way in which, say, Xnu and Linux are similar?

[Locke1689]

NT's approach to async IO is at least somewhat empirically better as it does not require an extra context switch between receiving a "ready" event and actually performing the IO operation.

[gpderetta]

Completion notification requires committing a (potentially cache-hot) buffer for an operation that might not complete until some time in the future. With readiness notification you only need to have the buffer ready when you know you will use it.

Also, on an high performance poll/epoll/kevent based system you only need to poll cold fds, while you can do speculative direct read/writes to hot fds, so no need for extra syscalls in the fast case.

That doesn't mean that completion notification doesn't have its advantages, especially when coupled with NT builtin auto-sizing thread pool, but it is not strictly better.

[trentnelson]

You could do that if you really wanted on Windows; just set a 0 byte user space send and receive socket buffer.

You can do dual synchronous/asynchronous socket I/O in Windows. I use this very approach with PyParallel (and 0 byte send buffers): https://github.com/pyparallel/pyparallel/blob/branches/3.3-p...

Depending on current load, that will either immediately do an asynchronous operation, or attempt synchronous non-blocking ones up to a certain number, then fall back to asynchronous.

Described here: https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-...

[deprave]

You must mean "theoretically" because "empirically" implies that you're basing your statement on observations. Where are the numbers? :)

[ksk]

To level the playing field, and if we are to take your opinion seriously, it would be beneficial to know what books or articles or whitepapers you have read to inform yourself about the design of the NT kernel.

[deprave]

I'm sorry, who's "we"? You replied to a comment that presented fact. The fact is that Windows use is mostly limited to desktops. As far as you're concerned, I could be entirely illiterate and my argument would still hold because it's based on fact. If you want to claim Windows is superior, please don't point us to design documentation. Show us actual numbers and use cases where Windows outperforms Unix, or is used in critical infrastructure, etc.

(FYI, I've read the "internals" book for a relatively old version of Windows, along with plenty of books about attacking the Windows kernel through its huge attack surface that exists to accommodate various needs of various software vendors...)

[ksk]

>You replied to a comment that presented fact.

False. You ASSUMED facts based on co-relation - "Its used everywhere" doesn't mean anything. "But people must have a reason to use them" STILL doesn't mean anything. "Well, so why don't they use windows" STILL doesn't get you anywhere.

> I could be entirely illiterate and my argument would still hold because it's based on fact.

No. You can't enter into an argument when you know nothing about the subject. That is not how it works.

Why don't YOU present actual facts about the design? Show us you actually understand the internals of the kernel or have atleast some rudimentary knowledge. Otherwise you'd just be wasting everyone's time.

[bitwize]

There are more server deployments of Windows than there are of Linux.

This is because Linux's server workload is mainly the Web. But every departmental office needs an Exchange server...

[xorblurb]

Well, that's an (unbacked) opinion, and I don't share it. NT design is not too bad (obviously especially in contrast with Consumer Windows), and especially given what was achieved on the first few releases (that was made easier by Cutler serious experience in the area), but now it is far from brillant, and it has it (huge) share of problems every serious users of both Windows and Unix based OS knows.

Now at one point, way in the past, NT was far above Linux, and some Linux fanboys existed that did not even knew what they were talking about, yet had strong opinions of superiority about the kernel they used. Now we are ironically in the opposite situation: Linux has basically caught up on all the things that matters (preemptive kernel, stability, versatility, scalability) and then quickly overtook NT, yet some people like to talk endlessly about the supposed architectural superiority of NT, that did not provide anything concrete in the real world in the long term and widely used, and that MS had to work around and/or redo with an other approach (while keeping vestigial of all the old ones) to do all its modern stuff.

What kernel hackers know to do, is to detect problem in architecture that look neat on paper. Brillant ones are able to anticipate. I don't even have to: history has shown were NT has been hold back by its original design.

[trentnelson]

You, I like you. You get it.