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?
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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)
Only passingly related, some fun rust stack-allocation insanity by my 17yo son:
https://ogghostjelly.github.io/slog/alloca.html
17? You should be very proud. This is good work for anyone, but especially at his age!
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?
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking of debuggers...
I still twitch whenever someone says "use ddd" and they are not referring to Evans' seminal work.
:-D
Why do you think that is not already happening within Microsoft?
> who can
Probably enough to keep Windows going, at least.
> and want to
Not if the pay or location is uncompetitive.
Maybe they'll just train Copilot on their code to help them.
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.
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)
Obviously it's Copilot /s