Yesterday, a story made its rounds across the internet. It was picked up by many large news websites, and I'm sure it will be quoted by people until eternity. It was published by a large website, looked all fancy, it had multiple pages - it looked like it was really something. However, anyone with even the remotest bit of knowledge knows that the article was a collection of complete and utter bogus.
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Member since:2006-07-25
I don't understand why so many people think that releases of OS's are complete rewrites.
Windows Vista was based on Windows 2k3 which was based on XP which was based on 2k which was based on NT4 and so on.
Mac OSX all of them are based off 10.0 which in turn was based on NextStep and so on
Linux evolves
To do an OS rewrite would be practically impossible, not only would you have an OS that would take a long time to product but it wouldn't be mature and would certainly be filled with bugs.
OS's are incredibly complex, but they are evolved. It reminds me when people critise the windows file system NTFS, Vista is not using the same NTFS from 3/4 era it has been evolved over time, the NTFS found in win2008 can self repair without rebooting. This is not to say that it's the only FS that can do this, but it proves the filesystem aswell as the OS's are evolved and improved over time.
Not even Microsoft with all it's money and developers could rewrite something as complex as the Windows OS in todays modern expectations of what an OS should do and have.
Member since:2008-11-02
Member since:
2005-11-09
Vista was the code base, just like every OS release.
Vista was a major restructuring of the windows code. It is much more componentized now than it ever was. This allowed the Windows 7 guys to make some changes to how Vista worked by replacing a few chunks of code.
Windows 7 has some major interface changes as well, the biggest being that there is an asynchronous UI system, meaning that you can interact with the PC at your own pace and do not have to wait for an operation to complete to click the next widgit, etc.