old-new-win32api VS serenity

Do you have any recommendations?

I assume this is the one you’re talking about https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

I was curious, went to the end (page 699!) and it’s pretty interesting. But obviously it’s hard to find the important ones.

Not quite. DOS was just the bootloader for Windows 9x.

While Windows 95's kernel didn't have the full feature set of NT, it still was more sophisticated than DOS.

Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063

Some registry keys also have The Old New Thing posts by Raymond Chen [1] /s

[1] https://github.com/mity/old-new-win32api#registry

Lucky you, Raymond Chen did an overview in his blog series "Inside STL". You can view it here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Yes, Raymond Chen describes such fixes in [several blog posts](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/) and in his book The Old New Thing. Check the old posts, back at the beginning. There are posts about to which lengths they went to ensure buggy applications still worked after an update or a fix.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/larryosterman/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

A couple of blogs as an example: - Raymond Chen - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ - Pavel Yosifovich - https://scorpiosoftware.net/ - Adam Sawicki - https://asawicki.info/index - Matt Pettineo - https://therealmjp.github.io/ - Scratchapixel - https://www.scratchapixel.com/

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

SerenityOS replicates that look and feel. It is also implemented in a dialect of C++ that adheres to some of the good parts of C++98: https://serenityos.org

One example of a useful technique

https://serenityos.org/ apparently only makes source code available. There are no binary images of the OS to install

I think Andreas said this functions like a little test -- if you're not willing to build it from source, then you probably wouldn't be a good contributor anyway.

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Likewise, my shell project provides source tarballs only, right now - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/

It is packaged in a number of places, which I appreciate. That means some other people are willing to do some work.

And they provide good feedback.

I would like it to be more widely available, but yeah I definitely see that you need to "gate" peanut gallery feedback a bit, because it takes up a lot of time.

Of course, it's a tricky balance, because you also want feedback from casual users, to make the project better.

Indeed, given the existence of `JS::NonnullGCPtr`, `JS::GcPtr` intentionally corresponds to a nullable pointer, so it seems dangerous to convert one to a reference without a null-check.

That said, a naive code search finds what *may* be more cases of this pattern:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ASerenityOS%2Fserenity+%2F...

Eg: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/a68b134e6dea5065... -> https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/a68b134e6dea5065...

In some of those search results, it is fine because there is a preceding null-check, and obviously I know nothing about this code other than this naive search result, but perhaps it would be prudent to vet all of them.

It is a SerenityOS project. You can find the answer to that question in their primary project's FAQ[1].

1. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documenta...

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

The best way to write proper exception free C++ is not to use the C++ Standard Library.

I initially confused it with Serenity OS prior to watching the video: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

My contributions to SerenityOS[0] helped me get my current job. My team lead (who was also my interviewer) was interested in what I did since I listed some of it in my CV, and I showed him some PRs I made and explained what went into each of them. It was really exciting because I didn't have professional experience with low-level development, and basically got the job due to hobby programming.

[0]: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pulls?q=is%3Apr+autho...

Definitely not "literally impossible", just a great deal of work. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird