That’s the message that underlies MinWin. It’s not a mess, we know what we’re doing, and we’ve got it under control. We can hack on this codebase for decades to come. See, our software is made up of parts, too. It’s a belated response to the success of bazaar-style development models such as Linux and KDE.
They need to sell us the idea that Windows development is sustainable, that they have a plan to mitigate code complexity and to combat “Brooksian” communications overhead. I’m sure it was a somewhat useful engineering exercise internally, but it was primarily targeted at people like us here at OSNews. They managed to split out the source code, make it separately buildable, and jazz it up for demonstration purposes. They try to get away with calling MinWin a microkernel, but in reality it’s just a logical subset of their existing monolithic NT-based kernel. MinWin is an attempt to demonstrate publicly that, although Windows is large and complex, the codebase is more structured and manageable than one might think.
Microsoft’s marketing and HR teams realized that the perception among college-age developers that Windows is huge, bloated, and unwieldy was driving prospective developers away from the platform.
It will be based on “Minwin” (they’ll probably have an ‘edgier’ marketing name for the technology soon)
