Over the years, I’ve repeatedly heard that Windows NT is a very advanced operating system and, being a Unix person myself, it has bothered me to not know why. I’ve been meaning to answer this question for years and I can do so now, which means I want to present you my findings.
My desire to know about NT’s internals started in 2006 when I applied to the Google Summer of Code program to develop Boost.Process. I needed such a library for ATF, but I also saw the project as a chance to learn something about the Win32 API. This journey then continued in 2020 with me choosing to join Microsoft after a long stint at Google and me buying the Windows Internals 5th edition book in 2021 (which I never fully read due to its incredible detail and length). None of these made me learn what I wanted though: the ways in which NT fundamentally differs from Unix, if at all.
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NT was groundbreaking technology when it launched. As I presented above, many of the features we take for granted today in systems design were present in NT since its inception, whereas almost all other Unix systems had to gain those features slowly over time. As a result, such features don’t always integrate seamlessly with Unix philosophies.
Today, however, it’s not clear to me that NT is truly “more advanced” than, say, Linux or FreeBSD. It is true that NT had more solid design principles at the onset and more features that its contemporary operating systems, but nowadays… the differences are blurry. Yes, NT is advanced, but not significantly more so than modern Unixes.
What I find disappointing is that, even though NT has all these solid design principles in place… bloat in the UI doesn’t let the design shine through. The sluggishness of the OS even on super-powerful machines is painful to witness and might even lead to the demise of this OS.
Brilliant read for those of you interested in operating system design.
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