[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: [PATCH] MinGW and portability

[Dave Dodge]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 12:16:22PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> Possible reasons MS left them in place for win32:
> 
> - to avoid breaking code that stupidly uses them for no reason (making
>   them no-op?).

That would be my guess.  Sometimes they seem to have an obsession with
making things bug-compatible for as long as possible in order to allow
badly-written applications to keep working.

One of the best ones I've heard is "file system tunneling", which is
essentially intentional filesystem corruption in order to mimic DOS:

  http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/07/15/439261.aspx
  http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=172190

And perhaps the most blatant example is their choice of LLP64:

  http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/31/363790.aspx

                                                  -Dave Dodge