An Abstract View of Priorities

When Microsoft developers designed the thread scheduler, they realized that it would not fit everyone’s needs all the time. They also realized that the "purpose" of the computer would change over time. When Windows NT first came out, object linking and embedding (OLE) applications were just starting to be written. Now, OLE applications are commonplace. Game and multimedia software is much more prevalent, and certainly the Internet wasn’t discussed much in the early days of Windows.

The scheduling algorithm has a significant effect on the types of applications that users run. From the beginning, Microsoft developers realized that they would need to modify the scheduling algorithm over time as the purpose of the system ...

Get Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.