The old new thing
by Raymond Chen · first published 2006
53% recommend46% neutral1% critical
Why HN recommends it
Explains why Windows APIs and behaviors are the way they are, with stories of backward-compatibility hacks, Windows 95 design thinking, and how a huge codebase evolves. Suits Windows developers and curious outsiders.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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Raymond Chen in his excellent The Old New Thing blog frequently asks - "What if two programs did this". What if every large C++ library came with their own custom preprocessor? The major issue with moc is that it is evidence that Qt does not think…
on “Moc myths debunked” ↗If, like me, you find these quirks and oddities fascinating, you must keep an eye on Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing[1]. [1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
on ““We Are Morons” – A quick look at the Win2k source (2004)” ↗…competitive advantage for them… every time I get a glance into Windows APIs I'm blown away by how much historical garbage they seem to be stuck with. I get this feeling every time I read a post on The Old New Thing (Raymond Chen). He'll patiently explain why some weird wart is the way it is, or how misusing some API is bad, and it's always extremely interesting. But at the same time I'm sitting there just thanking…
on “The glibc s390 ABI break (2014)” ↗…operating system when you have an office suite installed? In a perverse way, I enjoy stuff like this. Why? Because, someday, Raymond Chen will write about this and I will get to read about it on The Old New Thing, and while Chen will do a wonderful job of explaining the immediate causes, they will point to other technical oddities so bizarre that I will be reduced to a kind of mute incomprehension usually reserved…
on “Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately” ↗…individual contributor. I actually preferred the C and older C++ components, with no exceptions and manual memory and error handling, to the "modern" C++ components. I recommend Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing, for some cool stories about how and why ancient Windows/Office components were written a certain way, and what the effects down the line have been. Among other things. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/…
on “Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance” ↗…code would have to be written for notepad to do its own text editing. Microsoft takes backwards compatibility very seriously. Anyone curious about the Microsoft side of this should find Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog interesting (about 5 posts a week). For example here is content tagged history: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/tag/history and here is how there are actually two copies of Notepad…
on “Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad” ↗Two books I think every developer should read: 'The Design and Evolution of C++' by Bjarne Stroustrup 'The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows' by Raymond Chen (you could just read through his blog, book I quite enjoyed having a book). What I feel these books really helped with was…
on “Books every developer should read” ↗Despite never being a Windows developer, I ended up reading Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog from start to finish while lying in bed with a nasty flu and wanting to die a couple years ago. After that, I don't think anything somebody reports as a Windows application bug could make me think…
on “If you move your mouse continually the query may not fail. Do not stop moving” ↗…that Raymond Chen ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ ) was a huge part of ensuring that everything was backwards compatible. If you like that kind of thing, he's got a book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Old-New-Thing-Development/dp/03214...
on “How Apple Cheats” ↗Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs. Read Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog for some anecdotes about the amazing lengths they would go internally to keep old software working. Like with the classic game Sim City they realized its code was buggy and using uninitialized memory,…
on “Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today” ↗…better performance). I like it so much I implemented it in ReactJS https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/ Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.
on “Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)” ↗It seems this was one of two appendices to Raymond Chen's book "Old New Thing". The appendix doesn't exist in printed form for some reason though. It's a great book and definitely worth reading. The second appendix is titled "Tales of Application Compatibility" http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321440303/samplech...
on “How to ensure that your program does not run under Windows 95 (1995) [pdf]” ↗Same here. I just finished reading Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing, and it was really reassuring to read about the choices the Windows developers would make to always give the user the final choice over the programs. Hopefully Microsoft still has devs like these working…
on “macOS now scans for malware whenever it gets a chance” ↗…helping the application developers fix their applications). It's an interesting conceptual grey area - I don't consider it backward compatibility in a strict sense. This is documented in the book "The old new thing" by Raymond Chen (it's possible also to read the blog, but the book gives an organic view). It's fascinating how far-sighted Microsoft was; this approach, clearly very expensive, has been fundamental…
on “Stop making Linux distributions, make applications instead” ↗I love how it was already clear that it would be Raymond Chen's blog just from the title and domain name. I really enjoy The Old New Thing and his coverage of obscure details that might otherwise be long forgotten.
on “The mysterious second parameter to the x86 ENTER instruction” ↗