No, Windows has stable API and ABI named Win32 API. This comes from times of 16bit Windows and works also in x64 / ARM / ARM64, previously it worked in Alpha / MIPS / IA64. This API is implemented in kernel.dll user.dll gdi.dll advapi.dll and similar, it does some stuff, but mostly forwards to the NT API. Beware, kernel.dll is user space component despite its name (historical reasons). NT API is undocumented and not meant to be used by user programs, it is not stable, it lives in ntdll.dll, it does syscalls to the kernel: ntoskrnl.exe. Windows doesn't have a libc (for user programs, it has private one for its own programs), Visual Studio has a libc. Each version of Visual Studio (roughly) has its own libc named msvcrt.dll msvrt100.dll msvcrt140.dll and similar, it hosts the C and C++ libc, it could be linked statically for various benefits and drawbacks.
A big motivation for it was security posture; it means that Microsoft can now ship security updates to UCRT that everyone can rely on rather than a ton of extra surface area through various multiple versions of runtime libraries.
It had (has) an unsupported, crippled, unversioned msvcrt.dll which if you used it very carefully with a subset of functions, you could write programs which worked fine on Windows NT and up.
FWIW, large swaths of ntdll are documented and supported these days, for performing work that can't be expressed via the win32 API like raw disk manipulation.
What about HW decoders? Of video formats (that are much more complex than image decoders)? Such as MPEG, H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1 and similar. If memory allocation is needed here and there, I guess there is always known maximum size of such allocation in advance. Written in the spec. Think of at chip design time, or at software decoder compile time. How else would HW decoders be even possible?
Also: Hey Google, do you even fuzz-test? Your own stuff?
The article says that GLONASS time counts days from zero to 1461, then resets back to zero. This is 4 years if we think leap year is once 4 years. But it is not. Leap year is once 4 years, but each 100 years it is not, except each 400 years it is. This is on average 365.2425 days per year not 365.25 days per year. Is GLONASS not long term thinking ahead enough?
GLONASS transmissions have fields for earth orientation parameters that are too small to allow for unbounded DUT1: it has a built-in assumption that its system time is close to earth rotation angle.
What about NaN? Does Erlang have NaN? How does Erlang compare two variables containing a NaN (or expressions evaluating to a NaN)? There are (2^24)-2 different NaNs in a 32bit IEEE 754 float, and there are (2^53)-2 different NaNs in a 64bit IEEE 754 double. The IEEE 754 standard says, that a NaN value should compare to any other number (including any other NaN) as not equal. Yes, the expression `x == x` could return `false`.
If you are administrator, you can create and launch new scheduled tasks ... as NT\SYSTEM from that you can ... anything. Get TCB privilege, get Trusted Installer account, install kernel level drivers ... god mode.
Implementing AES from scratch is easy and fun, just read the spec and implement it 1:1, until ... you encounter GCM mode and its Galois Field "weird" math. Very. Not. Fun.
Most cryptographic operations are easy to implement. The best part is when you make a mistake, you'll most likely get random nonsense out the end. Floating point code is much more difficult, often you'll get an answer that's almost correct or worse one that's correct most places...
Heard about a great floating point implementation bug just today. When nintendo released Super Mario 64 for the Wii virtual console, they essentially just made their own emulator that plays a single ROM. The emulator is pretty accurate, though they made a mistake when implementing floating point operation rounding: All operations end up rounding upwards to the next floating point number (as opposed to alternating, depending on the result). A consequence of this was that some of the moving platforms in the game that had a periodic up/down pattern would slowly (over the course of literal days) creep upwards. Ended up being exploited in a speedrun category where the player attempts to press the A button as little as possible.
Old time: 6 minutes (360 seconds).
New time: 1 minute and 50 seconds (110 seconds).
Speed-up calculated by article author: 1-110/360=0.694 (69.4% saved).
Speed-up calculated by me: 360/110=3.27 (3 times faster).
Please calculate it the other way around. It makes great difference when you say you made something 10× faster than when you say you saved 90% of work even if both mean exactly the same thing.
I don't think this remark is warranted here. Your sentence ("3.27 times faster") is clear, but conveys the same meaning. His sentence ("loading times are cut down by 70%") does not refer to "speed" or "fast" (Ctrl+F the blog post to check for yourself) and is technically correct and clear. So the criticism raised in the WordPress article (about the usage of the words "speed" and "fast") does not apply. The mistake would have been to talk about "70% faster" or a "70% speed-up", because then there is ambiguity for the reader.
Yes. At previous job where we were making a desktop Win32 application we experienced this. Our automatic pipeline is: Build server compiles all the .EXEs and .DLLs, creates an .EXE installer and sends it for testing. Test agent grabs the installer, installs the product and runs various test scenarios (pokes buttons, menu items, etc). One of those scenarios is HTML help (.CHM file) displayed inside Windows built-in help viewer that started to time-out. The solution was to go to Control Panel, Internet options, Clear Cookies. Also the product's check-for-updates-in-background feature on this machine was very slow because cookies. Both features are using Windows' (or IE's) high level HTTP library containing functions such as fetch-this-url-and-figure-out-TLS-and-redirects-automatigally.
