One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus.

I mean, Chen has decades of winternals in his head. Microsoft has been gutting their staff for years now. When the Petzold/Chen generation hang up their spurs, does Microsoft still have a critical mass of people who understand Windows from the metal up?

▲ AdieuToLogic 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> One thing that scares me a little is whether there are younger developers, say, 25-40, who can and want to pick up the mantle of Windows internals gurus.

A similar "brain drain" has occurred in macOS (formerly known as OS-X) over the years, as evident in man page documentation for "newer" daemons shipped. An easy way to verify this is to run:

  ps -A | awk '{ print $4 }' | grep 'libexec/.*[a-z]d$'

And compare the man pages for the daemons running with the man page for `launchd`.

While this exercise is illuminating, it is also depressing IMHO.

	▲	masklinn an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> formerly known as OS-X It was never OS-X, it was OS X, and originally Mac OS X, as in the one after Mac OS 9. The Mac prefix was dropped with Lion (10.7). The Mac OS lingo having itself been introduced with 7.6, before that the OS core was called System.
	▲	pjmlp 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And the documentation, now it is mostly generated, the famous Apple books are now gone, at least the archive is still available.

▲ pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess?

Microsoft new blood has been educated on Macs and ChromeOS, even if they do games it is most likely consoles.

On WinUI community calls you usually would get puzzled faces when the Q&A touched when would WinUI be able to do "insert basic Win32/Forms/WPF" feature.

Management apparently doesn't care they actually understand Windows, or get the required trainings to meet the quality of their predecessors.

That is how you get Webview2 all over the place.

	▲	wolfi1 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		i fear the times when the chip makers change their architectures and the OS makers have to change the inner working of their OSes but then again, I guess there is an equivalent in the chip-making industry as well

▲ LatencyKills 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was a dev on the Visual Studio and Windows teams in the 90s. I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities.

I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger.

I’m not being critical; they are just focused on higher level abstractions.

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stevenwoo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s fun to understand just for intellectual curiosity’s sake but the number of people who get to work on shipping code where ring-0 knowledge is useful has to be minuscule as a percentage. It feels like a minor miracle I got to work on device drivers in my career. I imagine students might be more worried about completing assignments and good grades than the ins and outs of debuggers, too, though understanding those is important for problems one is more likely to come across in work projects versus smaller school assignments.

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Agentlien 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> the number of people who get to work on shipping code where ring-0 knowledge is useful has to be minuscule as a percentage

I wonder if it it is more that the percentage of people who choose to dedicate themselves to that type of work is miniscule. I work in graphics and performance, and it seems similar.

Few people really work on it specifically at any given company, and I've heard people warn others that there are few jobs in it.

But video game companies really want people for those roles and will pay well because they're hard to find. Still, few programmers show any interest in specializing in those skills. If you're passionate about it and willing to learn the details you'll eventually find a lot of job opportunities. I know people who want to work with this and do so - I know many more who have specifically said they want to stay away from it. I don't know anyone who wants to and can't.

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movpasd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How would one start learning about it?

	▲	Agentlien 41 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Before listing resources, let me state that the single most important thing is to learn by doing. Write a lot of rendering code, experiment a lot with your own ideas and variations on each exercise. Once you move past the basics don't be afraid to spend several evenings in a row failing to fix what in hindsight seems like an embarrassingly simple math error. That is how you go from having read and sort of understood something to really knowing it. Also, the best approach is usually to devour as much content as you can from several sources to get a wider perspective. There are a lot of great resources out there. The best modern beginner friendly resource I am aware of is Scratchapixel[0]. Back when I was first learning 3D I used to follow tutorials on places like NeHe Productions[1], which is probably a bit dated these days. For more comprehensive information on all kinds of techniques, with examples from big games for each technique, the absolutely best resource is the book Real-Time Rendering[2]. If you're interested in ray-tracing rather than rasterization (i.e. more film than video games) a lot of people recommend "Ray Tracing in One Weekend"[3]. If you want to learn state of the art ray-tracing in depth, with all the math and and theory, the best resource is "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation"[4], which is freely available online. [0] https://www.scratchapixel.com/ [1] https://nehe.gamedev.net/ [2] https://www.realtimerendering.com/ [3] https://raytracing.github.io/ [4] https://www.pbrt.org/
	▲	kfreds 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you want to learn more about how computers work I would recommend the following: - The OS Dev wiki - Open Source Firmware Conference — TKey (shameless plug) - Tiny Tapeout - wafer.space In rough hierarchical order from software to metal.

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arjvik 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Arguably the lower level abstractions are more interesting too! how exactly Windows does ring-0 is less interesting than writing your own ring-0! And unless you care about writing driver-level software for Windows or contributing to the kernel, learning this is also less useful.

I'm essentially arguing that unless you work at MSFT, there's next to no reason to learn that specific abstraction layer.

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AdieuToLogic 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Speaking of debuggers...

I still twitch whenever someone says "use ddd" and they are not referring to Evans' seminal work.

:-D

▲ dataflow 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> who can

Probably enough to keep Windows going, at least.

> and want to

Not if the pay or location is uncompetitive.

▲ charcircuit 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do you think that is not already happening within Microsoft?

▲ majorchord 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe they'll just train Copilot on their code to help them.

▲ im3w1l 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One trend to watch is AI cheat devices. Instead of running detectable software they have a fully separate device that uses AI for object detection and aimbotting. If cheaters move to using those, then the argument for kernel mode anticheat weakens. And that is the cornerstone keeping gamers on windows.

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matheusmoreira 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Now I'm looking forward to these AI cheat devices. It's going to be hilarious if the kernel anticheat malware finally gets killed by AI aimbots of all things.

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not_a9 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

While I’m not sure if this is a bot (where did vidya enter the convo?), game hacking on both cheat and anticheat side has genuinely deep Windows internals knowledge (admittedly somewhat lopsided, but deep nonetheless)

	▲	im3w1l 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Producer and consumer sides are tied. If there is strong demand for windows development then there will be money sloshing around which will attract devs. I predict demand will decrease, at least for this particular niche. To go even further off topic, being called a bot is certainly a wake up call for me that the internet is dying, and I'm not ready for it, and need to reposition myself asap somehow.

▲ mrheosuper 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Obviously it's Copilot /s