OT: Windows Optimization?

[Will]

AgentZero said:
Just a side note from someone who admittedly failed first-year computer science, but if it's possible to make Windows-compatible applications, should it not be possible to make a Windows-compatible operating system?

Technically, it could be done. But the details involved are way too huge for any entity (even Microsoft) to deal with. The big deal with Windows is that damn near everything is backwards compatible, so stuff that runs in Win9x usually runs in WinXP, and some stuff that runs in Win3.x does, and some old DOS programs even run under XP. The problem comes in when Microsoft kept "undocumented features", aka bugs, in the backwards compatibility code, since some applications used these in their programs. I don't know of any specific examples, but imagine something like passing NULL pointers to a file system function gave you the data from the Last time the function was used instead of returning an error... a lot of stuff like that was used by "programmers" because it worked at the time, even if it wasn't necessarily correct. Pile up about 15-20 years of that, and making an emulator that does all of that stuff is... well, impossible. Wine and its ilk are getting close, but I don't think they'll get there.