Re: A challenge for RosAsm

Hi Guys,

I was trying to find what people are saying about ReactOS on
newsgroups, and stubmled upon this long thread... I'm honoured to see
Randall Hyde posting here. Mr. Hyde, I have your book (although never
used your software, not that it sucks, but I'm too used to MASM and
regular ASM syntax, although I recommend HLL to any new learner), and
it's an amazing source of information.

I'm sad to see that Betov has been attacking Mr.Hyde in some very snide
ways... I've seen some comments dating back to some years ago, and I am
honestly disgusted by his attitude, calling Randall a "Nazi" among
other things. It saddens me that someone that is so excite about our
operating system will go to such lengths to be insulting to Mr. Hyde
and the other posters on this group. For this reason, I want to
publicaly state that "Betov" has absolutely no relationship to our
group and that, I, personally, don't even have the slightest clue to
who he is. His comments do not reflect the position, and are totally
unrelated to, the ReactOS Development group and foudation.

On the other hand, I am also slightly annoyed by Mr. Hyde dissing
ReactOS, although I can understand why he chooses to do so when
confronted to Betov. I'd like to update you on our current progress,
because it seems there are a lot of (understandable) false rumors
flowing around.

1) We do use WINE and a number of other open-source projects which are
mature (such as Freetype, MESA (for openGL), and a variety of static
libraries, like libnurbs.

2) NT 4.0 Compatibility is not our goal. Windows compaibility is. I
have personally been coding features that have just appeared in Windows
2003 SP1, and most of our design is NT5+ Based. It's a false argument
to say that by the time we reach NT4, so and so will happen. We will
never "React NT4". We will reach Windows compatibility. What we define
to be right now, is when our driver model and user-mode libraries run
most Windows applications. The fact of the matter is that 99% of the
applications users run can be put in a bin with less then 100
applications. Because of our development philosphy, we don't just make
hacks for applications to work, but are actually desgining a fully
compatible OS (even internally). The number of internal information,
books, and samples/pseudo-code on Windows has increased dramatically.
There are now sources of information (some published by Microsoft
thsemelves) which go in extreme depth to some internal management done
by Windows... continued below...

3) You will not have to "port" your application to ReactOS... as
mentionned above, our compatibility will make it so that your windows
apps and drivers work out of the box. Even our SDK and DDK is
compatible with the Microsoft one. I have currently designed an "NDK",
or Native Developemnt Kit, which even guarantees compatiblity acrross
Windows and ReactOS on Native, undocumented structres and APIs. Yes,
there are some drivers and apps which do evil things for comptibility,
which shouldnt' even be signed by Microsoft (for example, some drivers
read user-mode memory based on a table of pointers which detect the OS
Version...truly horible coding). But those are drivers that even on a
future version of Windows woudl break, and that we are handlign with
dynamic patching technology (we've only met one until now).

4) We won't be done in 10 years, when we'll be irrelevant. Our
realistic goal is NT architecutre and compatibility ready in at most 3
years. That means office, quicken, PnP, drivers for most devices, ntfs,
etc will all be supported, including sound and networking. The old
argument used to be
"You'll have NT4 in 3 years, and by that time longhorn will be out and
change everything". The fact of the matter is we'll run XP apps in 3
years, and even if longhorn will be out by then (doubtful), you all
know that not only avalon, winfs and a bunch of oter features have been
removed (recently, even the new command shell was removed), but
Microsoft has also said that it will -not- be .NET based. So it won't
"Revolutionize" anything, and it won't make 2k/xp/reactos obsolete.

Anyways, I'm done ranting for now... once again, I apologize for the
comments made against you by Betov and wish to again insist that he is
not related to our project. And I hope my update will have helped you
draw a clearer picture of what is going on. If you ever want to help,
we welcome you on our IRC channel, #reactos, on irc.freenode.net, or
viist our wiki at http://wiki.reactos.org.

Best regards,
Alex Ionescu
Lead Kernel Developer, ReactOS Project

Frank Kotler wrote:
> Betov wrote:
>
> ...
> > There is no problem with understanding or not understanding.
> > My problem is that anyone in between my gun and Master Pdf
> > must be shot down.
>
> Careful. Some of us shoot back :)
>
> > Master Pdf _wrote_ right here, that his so "wonderfull"
> > Macro, - he is so proud of (...) -, expands into thousands
> > of Lines - meaning to impress the readers... -, and that,
> > the day one of his victims had created insane bloat
>
> Any "insane bloat" in Paul's code is caused by lotsa text. Not the
> macro. The only problem was that it was slow to build. I don't know if
> you really don't understand this, or if you'll say *anything* to HLA,
> even if you know it's untrue...
>
> > ... and if then you Double-Left-Click upon "Message",
>
> "strings" doesn't have that option :)
>
> Best,
> Frank

.

Relevant Pages

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