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What Language Is Windows Written In?

Asked by Elliot B.,

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Grand Master

azcodemonkey

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As far as I know, most of Windows is written in C++.
If most of windows is written in C++, why is the API all C-based? ( with exception to GDI+ ) MFC is a wrapper to the API, not the API itself.

In fact, many MS employees program in C/C++ in emacs, sometimes running linux. They don't typically use Visual Studio or any of the Visual (C++, Basic, etc.) interfaces or languages to code in. I personally find it amusing they don't use Visual Studio, but then again, not all of them can, cuz what are they going to write Visual Studio in? Not a previous version of Visual Studio!

Where'd you hear that? /.?

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CyBeRiA

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In fact, many MS employees program in C/C++ in emacs, sometimes running linux. They don't typically use Visual Studio or any of the Visual (C++, Basic, etc.) interfaces or languages to code in. I personally find it amusing they don't use Visual Studio, but then again, not all of them can, cuz what are they going to write Visual Studio in? Not a previous version of Visual Studio!

Where'd you hear that? /.?

Microsoft information session at my school. We were asking programmers and project managers some questions about it. And a friend of mine who worked there over the summer confirmed it. Not Slashdot.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I was just amused. It makes sense though, as a lot of those programmers are rather "hardcore", if you will. But I'm not saying you're not a serious programmer if you use VS.

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PeterHammer

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C/C++ are not portable! There are all sorts of differences in hardware platforms that prevent that, particularly when you are writing code that is not targeted at an OS, but at hardware directly (as is the case when you are writing an OS). Each CPU family (x86, PowerPC, Sparc etc..) provides different instruction sets that can be called from C/C++ or other low-level languages and a program written with the x86 set in mind would never work on a PowerPC or Sparc without modifications and recompilation.

Writing a whole OS in assembler is possible but I highly doubt anyone would ever do that these days. The tedium alone would stop any developer from doing it. Besides, if windows was entirely written in assembler, my guess is MS would be very reluctant to develop versions of WinXP for Itanium or Opteron as it would require the whole thing to be redeveloped for the new instruction sets.

If you are creating an application, you can make programs written in C/C++ be portable if you use a portability layer like the one provided by Apache at apr.apache.org or the one by mozilla at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/index.html. Even so they only work when you are writing programs target to run on an OS (not on hardware alone) as they provide an abstraction layer to an OSes intrinsic types (strings, longs, floats etc..) and to other OS facilities like threading.

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