I think they are slowing moving away from direct legacy support, as they’ve come to terms with the fact that it is just too much of a burden. Rather, I see them switching more and more to virtual OS layers. Doubt they would, or even could, be as bold as Apple and just say something is deprecated.

I also think you are right in saying that they will move more toward a virtual OS to deal with the legacy problem. I’m really surprised that they haven’t attempted this already to a larger extent (I know Win7 has some WinXP virtualization, but I wouldn’t consider it to the same extent as, say, Mac OS X and OS 9.)

@Brandon
You are right in that I shouldn’t have made it sound like the kernel itself needs to be slimmed down. What I was trying to say, is that it seems the kernel fits into the system in such a way that it actually has dependencies on the stuff that sits on top. At least that’s the impression that I got reading about this project, mostly from the story about how deploying a system with just a kernel and minimal shell was not possible.

It’s hard to say from the outside how things are and I don’t know much about the public information published on Windows internals, so what I’ve just said might still be inaccurate. I suppose it’s possible that the kernel itself does not have dependencies on higher layers, but instead its all of the lower level shell / system api stuff with dependencies that go up the stack. Either way, it sounds like circular dependency hell.

Your point about doomed to re-invent is an interesting way to look at this. I think it’s certainly something that Microsoft has to deal with (as well as any other company/organization maintaining the same software over many years). However, the sense I get with the MinWin project is that they are not so much reinventing anything this time as simply trying to organize and understand the system that they have in a better way. Then again, maybe they have had to reinvent many of their internal structures and systems to accomplish the goals of MinWin, the extent of something like this is not clear to me.

Your other points about schedule vs engineering are valid, but quite honestly I feel that the problem is more of the “doomed to re-invent” variety. I could go on for hours about COM, IPC, RPC, and other disasters of strongly typed external interfaces that are at the core of the problem. However, the real issue stems from an systematic (not just in engineering) misunderstanding of composition and evolution. Contact me off the record sometime for a more, um… “colorful”… explanation of why Microsoft platforms are the way they are.

I think they are slowing moving away from direct legacy support, as they’ve come to terms with the fact that it is just too much of a burden. Rather, I see them switching more and more to virtual OS layers. Doubt they would, or even could, be as bold as Apple and just say something is deprecated.