Should ReactOS rather focus on NT 3.1 compatibility first?

[Tobi]

What do you think about that idea?

This project has been active for decades, but the improvements were not that immense due to the complexity of NT 5.2.

Win NT 3.1 has a disk space requirement of about 90 MB and should be far less complex.


Development could focus on things like the hidden Native API, a printing system, networking or other things a useful OS just needs. Since NT 3.1 has less code lines than 5.2, debugging should also be easier.

In my theory it should be easier to cope with all that lowlevel kernel / memory / sheduling / timing stuff if the souce code is more stripped down...

Of course you could also try to add some WINE and OpenGL stuff, but keeping the focus on 3.1 compatibility...


After the 3.1 compatible ReactOS implementation works quite stable, the work could begin to get some 4.0 things to work etc pp...

[milon]

I'm not sure you understand what you're suggesting. I don't know a lot about the differences between NT revisions, but I know that would not be a helpful thing at this point. Going back to NT 3.1 would be equivalent to throwing out virtually all the progress ReactOS has made thus far. NT 3 and NT 5 are vastly different and there's very little that carries over. Certainly, there's nothing that would carry over without extensive testing, and writing everything from scratch would be much simpler. What would be gained from that approach?

[Z98]

The answer is no, and milon hit basically the major reasons why this would be a very bad idea. Another reason he didn't mention is how relatively useless an NT3.1 implementation would be today, since it predates damn near every piece of hardware (and quite a few standards) that a person today would be interested in using. NT5.2 at least still has some driver support for new pieces of hardware. And considering the differences between 3.1 and the 6.x+ series, a 3.1 implementation would see a good portion of its code thrown out anyway since the architecture has changed so much.

[livestrong2109]

I have to agree this idea is born out of pure ignorance and should be stickied as an example of things we might actually ban you for... Not that we've ever banned anyone..! You sir are what we like to call an "IDOIT."

BTW... loved 3.11Workgroups

[EmuandCo]

We normally dont ban, yes.

But I love to send out Warnings and some ppl are not here anymore because of getting 3 of them. The first one on the new site is for you, livestrong2109.

[livestrong2109]

It will be the last as well I'm not one to commonly go off on anyone. However most people know beter that to not only sugest an architecture change to a fourteen year old matured project, but to also find it appropriate to drop half our source just when we are making progress towards a working OS baffles me. All in all my advice to our friend. Please do your best to please learn more about a project, or about what your saying before you go posting something that will receive a resounding "NO!" from the entire community. I do however apologize for calling you an idiot as i'm sure you just didn't understand what you where suggesting.

[SomeGuy]

But... if you look at it from an application compatibility and feature completeness perspective, rather than an architectural one, then the question makes some sense. ReactOS is still missing important features that NT 3.1 had, such as integrated file sharing and printing, and it falls face down when running some applications designed to run on NT 3.x.

The answer of course, is that this is an open source project with volunteer developers, and many of them want to work on NT 5.2 related features, while boring things like printing don't get any attention.

[Pesho]

Just because the version is a lower number doesn't mean it's "the same thing but easier to make"...

[milon]

But... if you look at it from an application compatibility and feature completeness perspective, rather than an architectural one, then the question makes some sense. ReactOS is still missing important features that NT 3.1 had, such as integrated file sharing and printing, and it falls face down when running some applications designed to run on NT 3.x.

The answer of course, is that this is an open source project with volunteer developers, and many of them want to work on NT 5.2 related features, while boring things like printing don't get any attention.

Again, I don't claim to know much about the differences between the NT versions, but I doubt that integerated file sharing (for example) is implemented in NT 5.x the same way it's implemented in NT 3.x. So we're still either throwing out all the NT 5 work to focus on NT 3 (and we're obviously not going to do that), or we're continuing to work on NT 5 as we have been. Unless I'm wrong, in which case please correct me.

[Z98]

If you look at it from an application compatibility viewpoint, the question makes even less sense. Do you realize how many things MS added to the system and Win32 API from NT3.1 to 5.0, much less 5.2? Things that are now considered defacto and are linked against by basically all contemporary applications?

[jonaspm]

Should ReactOS rather focus on NT 3.1 compatibility first?

-1

[steveh]

NO
very bad idea going back to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1
Where would you find software and drivers running on such outdated kernel, today?

Even NT5.2 is approaching closer and closer the end-of-extended-support of WinXP, and possibly decreasing NT5.x support by application software manufacturers from 2014 onwards.

Remember that firefox dropped win2000 / nt5.0 support by 2012 (2 years after end-of-support by microsoft) due to compiler platform change.

[Zc456]

To late for that.