How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?(devblogs.microsoft.com)
32 pointsby ingve5 hours ago2 comments
  • kjellsbells2 hours ago
    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?

    • dataflowan hour ago
      > who can

      Probably enough to keep Windows going, at least.

      > and want to

      Not if the pay or location is uncompetitive.

    • LatencyKillsan hour ago
      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.

      • arjvik17 minutes ago
        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.

    • majorchord2 hours ago
      Maybe they'll just train Copilot on their code to help them.
    • im3w1l2 hours ago
      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.
    • mrheosuper20 minutes ago
      Obviously it's Copilot /s
  • ferrow12 minutes ago
    [flagged]