[jmrm]

I knew about the difference they have between UNIX-like OSs in the usage of different signals (and the System V vs BSD battles, between others), but I didn't know Windows didn't have a similar system (I haven't done too much low-level in Windows).

Thanks for the long comment!

[fair_enough]

A lot of those design decisions in OSes were influenced by hardware limitations of home computers in the 1970s and 1980s. UNIX may have been around since '71, but Windows NT was designed to expose an API similar to DOS-based Windows 95 (the Win32 API), which in turn was designed around backward compatibility with MS-DOS, which in turn was designed to mimic other other "DOS" OSes from other companies in the late 70s. This ultimately traces back to a time when consumer-grade hardware just couldn't handle all the features we now take for granted, like virtual memory and preemptive multitasking, or even floating point math.

However, Windows NT was also written after machines capable of running Unix cost less than a BMW so a lot of the good folks in Redmond during the early 90s took some liberties to improve on some fundamental design flaws of UNIX.

1. "Everything is a file" is very flexible for writing server applications where the user is expected to know and trust every program, but it is potentially harmful to expose devices as files to non-technical users. Nowadays with UEFI, you can even pipe /dev/zero to /dev/mem or /dev/port and brick your motherboard. There was a patch for this, but there are old servers running old Linux versions in the wild that can be permanently bricked.

2. Arguably, exposing such a wide range of signals to a userland program for it to handle is a design flaw, like the memory fault signals SIGSEGV and SIGBUS. They were not designed for IPC or exception handling, but they ended up being used that way by a lot of developers over the years. I won't start a war to make the case because I can see both sides on that, but #3 below is not controversial at all.

3. NTFS ACLs are a big improvement over UNIX-style ugo-rwx permissions. FWIW, they're also easier to work with than POSIX ACLs.

Just something to think about: the Windows way is radically different because compatibility with ye-olde DOS running on 68k CPUs ruined it in some ways, but in other ways its design was driven by learning from UNIX's mistakes.

despite the confusing name, Win32 is not just a 32-bit libc, it's a 64-bit libc on 64-bit Windows.