[gouranga]

Indeed.

Without wanting to gush too much, but NT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's orders of magnitude better than anything else on the market without a doubt for any application.

The bit people have the "hate problem" with is the Win32 subsystem that is chucked on top of it.

[shin_lao]

I've got many years of experience working with the NT kernel world (filesystem layer especially) and I can't upvote you enough. There aren't that many OS that have a working, unified, cache, a good hardware abstraction layer or the possibility to run any subsystem.

My only regret is that Microsoft didn't open the subsystem API enough. I submit they want to keep some freedom in this area.

[sageikosa]

I believe Windows NT is wonderful as well. But it wasn't designed as a real-time OS, whereas CE was; hence the comments that CE was "scrapped" for NT in Windows Phone 8.

The lack of real-time handling probably won't have much impact on the phone platform, since users (the primary interface consumers of the OS) don't operate anywhere near "real-time" anyway.

[shin_lao]

It's not a lot of work to make Windows NT real-time. Back in the time of NT 4.0 there was a modified kernel that was hard real-time (as far as I can remember).

[gouranga]

This is true. I think most of the RT stuff i.e. GSM/3G stuff is offloaded onto dedicated devices.