Why Windows 11 still ships with Windows 95's memory manager hidden inside it (windowslatest.com)

The article’s content is generally quite weak, could probably have been covered in an old school tweet with screenshots and nothing of value would have been lost.

The only positive thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t appear to be written by AI.

I don’t think this person truly understands what they’re writing about, they did a little research, made some screenshots and put enough words in the article so that it will show up in search engines.

It’s reminiscent to me of many articles on Windows error codes, almost all of them are basically generic, generally quite long with drivel, and steering you to install some “fix it” software. Any technical person coming across these just finds them annoying as they clearly gamed the search results with unhelpful content.

Rough guess but this is all content farming of Raymond Chen posts at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ though I can't find a smoking gun. I definitely remember an article about Intuit doing something some dumb they had to keep an internal API around reporting the wrong value or something like that.

From an article on this[0]:

> On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

I worked for this place that made a security auditing tool. The agent had to know which version of Windows it was running on. When Microsoft came out with a new version, the agent didn't know what it was running on, since it hadn't been updated to include that version. I forget what it did in response, but it didn't run right - maybe just terminated?

Microsoft discovered this in their testing, before they released the new Windows version. In response, they added our agent to a list of programs that Windows would lie to about the Windows version. If our program asked, we would be told the previous version.

Well, that was great, in that our program didn't terminate early (or whatever it did). But now, even after we updated our agent, it still wouldn't know whether it was running on the new version of Windows, and so would not audit it correctly!

This dance shows just how far Microsoft went with backward compatibility. We were not a top-1000-most-used program by any means, but they knew about us and tested us and fixed for us. (I mean, we didn't want it, in this case, but it was still impressive.)

I have read some similar things about macOS having app-specific fixes for popular apps.

It might have been this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034413

Didn't they also make sure Lotus 123 didn't run as well as it could have?

Also Windows has a huge community of people who will help you.

With Linux you're stuck trying to decipher the ramblings of neckbeards.

I worked on device connectivity in Windows core OS division in the Longhorn/Vista push. I came from the Linux and SunOS world before that. It was simply crazy at the dedication and effort put in to make Windows backwards compatible with whatever old broken and poorly behaving USB and printer device. We would have no-named cheap web cams that didn't function to USB spec but "worked" in Windows 98 that needed to work in Vista while still implementing new secure driver models that broke all cheap device assumptions. It was a long hard trek to get all those devices working.

My kid's a big fan of original StarCraft, which is now going on 28 years old.

I think you need an emulator to run Civ1, though. My kid was asking if we could try it and I'm like "I don't think I can find that on Steam..."

You can see my other comment, but short version is that I think it’s just content for the sake of content without the person actually really understanding the topic much more than most of their readers.

Because this article is an AI slop rehashing for SEO.

Not really. The modern NT enforces its specs unless you opt-in or Microsoft opts your Hyrum's Law monstrosity in.

Nobody is going to tell you that Python 2->3 wasn't excruciatingly painful but it's hard to argue with the result. Sometimes you have to rip the bandaid off. Python 3 is by far the better language.

You're right the "commercial" timeline of Python would have supported Python 2 forever because big paying clients demand it but I think that would have led to a worse outcome for the OSS community.

> Wish I could run 16-bit apps tho.

https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

And when you are running more than one application at the same time how is that supposed to work?

Userland system DLLs need to allocate memory too.

In 20 years we'll have finally reached the logical conclusion to all of this that there shouldn't be separate os components you link against and your "OS" will just be manager of lightweight VMs.

Now you can just ship the user your machine and software can theoretically be immortal.

If an OS update gives me a better allocator, I want every app to take advantage of it. Same idea with other libraries, if I update a library for reading zip files to make it go faster, or to fix a vulnerability, I want every application that uses that library to take advantage of it.

This is a debatable position. Linux distros usually do this, but a lot of modern applications ship with all their dependencies. I'd say the former is more efficient and generally better from a user perspective and the latter is more stable and is generally better from a developer/maintainer perspective. Open source encourages the former, proprietary software encourages the latter.

How does the memory allocator statically linked into the application request a new memory allocation into it's address space (sbrk or VirtualAlloc etc.)? Allocating memory will in most cases involve calling into the kernel, it's kinda a core function of a kernel. It has to have some link externally to the programme, directly or indirectly.

This is what sanitizers do.

There was such a tool, called Purify.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs343/resources/purify.pdf

A hidden z80 emulator...

are you implying the fact that they proactively threw in a custom heap manager for a game is supposed to be a bad thing? The fact that almost any 25+ year old executable runs on Windows to this day is fantastic, they're seemingly the only guys who take backwards compatibility seriously.