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Comment by slededit | Hacker News Reader

He can't say it publicly but the code behind the console is crap. Not just from a modern perspective looking back, the original devs hated it too. The book Show Stopper! Has some colorful words about it.

And since it's so core to the system and deeply intertwined you can't just go in and start arbitrarily changing things. Everyone has been too scared to touch it for the last 20 years.

This is painstaking careful work. I don't think throwing more people at it would really help too much.

My hat is off to you and your team for finally fixing this.

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Oh no, I can say that quite publicly. When I started on the team in 2015, that code was some nightmarish shit. It was hardly componentized, you'd have 70 different places in the code all calling out to GDI to do rendering at seemingly random points in the app's lifecycle. It was painful to get work done in the codebase.

After a LOT of refactoring it's finally in a state that's really quite managable, and much more modernized.

I hope you updated all that to D2D. I was always deeply offended you forced office to move with Universal but had the gall to link GDI in and keep using it for your own stuff :).

That part comes next ;) Getting all of the rendering calls isolated to one component was a pretty big task in itself, and just isolating and de-duplicating them improved our rendering perf by something like 30%

Your efforts are noticeable and appreciated! It was always a mystery to me why the Windows console was stuck in time from the NT days, and your work sends a signal to all those doing sysadmin and programming work that Microsoft is supporting these use cases in Windows.

Ouch. This sounds terrible. I can see how refactoring a bowl of spaghetti like that took a lot of time. I respect you for sticking with it and not throwing in the towel.

Refactoring spaghetti would have been a breeze compared to the Console.

What stands as a HUGE testament to the Console team's effort, however, is the fact that, while re-engineering what was truly a nightmare code-base, apart from a few newly-introduced bugs (most of which were caught before release), the rapidly improving Console didn't break any any existing command-line apps or users' workflows.

The engineering team deserve a medal for pulling this off, quite frankly!

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