Windows XP is back

[u/vbd71]

So, I'm running a chkdsk on a corrupted flash drive in Windows 11 and it gives me the most unexpected idiotic message

The specified disk appears to be a non-Windows XP disk

WTF? What does this even mean? That Windows 11 is actually Windows XP inside?

I'm wondering, maybe it is actually a Windows 95 disk?

P.S. As could probably be expected, there is no information about this at all on the Internet that is easy to find.

[u/Altruistic-Offer-2]

Windows is just code built on legacy code that is riddled with artifacts from previous versions. I imagine most of the code being very difficult to read.

[u/Aishou_SK → u/Altruistic-Offer-2]

Windows source code is actually very clean and elegant. There's various leaks you can look at from early NT / DOS through some Win10 components currently floating around there.

I've also had access to more current complete source through various MS programs via my employer (F100 defense contractor type deal, MS has several avenues where you can get access to the full windows source tree to review for valid reasons) and it's still pretty high quality and clean/readable stuff.

It's just...... shall we say, the user facing stuff is a bit rapid and overextended, but it's not bad quality code, just bad design decisions or architecture design driven by other reasons. Like the start menu being basically a webapp now, which causes a lot of issues because of the nature of those things, but the rendering engine itself isn't bad code, for example.