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by gnoway 3625 days ago
Unless you're OK with breaking compatibility with all existing Windows apps - most of which you have no control over - rewriting the kernel as a POSIX thing is going to look a lot like 'bash on windows' in reverse. You'd have to have some kind of shim layer to translate all the old system calls, so most everyone's existing software is going to be slower and there will be bugs, etc. Including your own, since Windows is a kernel, a ton of drivers, a userland (including basic runtimes), a windowing system, a basic set of productivity tools and games, etc.

I think this would be a total disaster that killed Windows, personally.

1 comments

> 'bash on windows' in reverse

That would be "wine", which has worked surprisingly well several years.

Wine is fine for getting around an expected limitation, but would you run your workloads on wine in a production datacenter? It would be a disaster.
I wonder what companies really have designed new backends for windows for years anymore? Technically you could run many generic things there (databases or JVM), but what would you actually gain? Likely if you have to use windows, you're left in some legacy niche, looking backwards and not into the future.
I'd run my entire development stack on Bash on Windows though. That's what it's there for. It's glorious!

Similarly, my laptop probably wouldn't be able to handle a production workload for any length of time...but it doesn't have to either.