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Comment by mhansen | Hacker News Reader

There is still a registry, because the registry is still a great idea.

Dvorak argues that the registry is 'a pile of junk clogging up the machine'. The registry is a tree data structure - more nodes won't 'clog it up', it'll still take the same number of operations to get anywhere in the tree

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Yeah, the registry is great. It would be much better though if the data was stored in application specific data files. They could still provide a unifying API but make it really easy to remove an application.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it wouldn't really be a registry then, would it?

Depends on what your definition of registry is. If the current registry is stored in two non consecutive disk blocks (due to fragmentation), is that still a registry? Think of per application files as disk blocks, with the registry API caching those into memory and operating as if it was a single database.

It's not clogged from the machine's perspective, but the user's. The problem is cleanly maintaining a computer with a registry that's gone through hundreds of OS updates and driver/application installs and uninstalls.

I don't think the data structure behind the registry is what he was referring to.

I think he was referring to things like the right click menu registry entry that accumulate so many entries over time that it takes 30 seconds to show the right click menu.

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