Looks like when designing the yet to be released Windows Vista, the idea of making it completely type safe seemed to come up and failed to make it into the design. So what exactly would that bring to the table? Actually a lot of things, such as being able to make lower level API calls more secure and allowing for better "safe" data abstraction. So why didn't they do it? Well in all honesty I would think that Microsoft’s designers may have been able to design Vista in a way so that it could be built in a type safe environment, however, they wouldn’t be able to do it based on backward compatibility. Microsoft, is very big on this issue, the whole Win32 API is primarily built on C/C++ (mostly C) and is definitely not type safe, which means that using managed code to interface with unmanaged code and vice versa, produces a real headache for the designers. Why is this an issue? Well if Microsoft came out tomorrow and said that our new operating system won’t support Win32 any more in favor of their new insert random code name API, they’d cause a lot of up roar in the development community and third party development companies. Which would result in major financial losses for Microsoft. They’d also have to deal with issues such as people who still want to use, let’s say Office 2003 and they don’t want to upgrade, if they can’t run legacy (be it back 10 years or 5) program on the new operating they are going to have a hell of a time convincing consumers to upgrade. The problem is that Microsoft saturation of the market is making it very difficult for the company to make radical changes to their operating system, without causing some sort of backlash. However, eventually some one will have to force the change, as issues such as security become a main focus in designing the latest and greatest operating systems.
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