> because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true)
It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway.
I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.
The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it?
Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.
I've heard of ReactOS, and it's not what I meant—the 'pipe dream' was Microsoft itself open-sourcing Windows and all its components, from the NT kernel to every single tiny program in Windows, like the various MMC plug-ins, Aero shell, Explorer, Task Manager, etc.
> Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway.
Binary patching is kind of a pain to do on system files these days, but it is possible. Usually not worth the trouble to dig in even more to do Microsoft's job for them, but sometimes it might be.
It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway.
I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.