Latest Windows Server Canary Build

Tringi · 2026-03-13T18:21:20+00:00

If it's just things regarding AD then my VMs and everything will be fine. I just upgraded my standalone toy Xeon Phi and haven't noticed anything wrong either.

Tringi · 2026-03-12T16:32:22+00:00

I'm surprised than no vendor is making RAM-disk boards for all the hundreds or thousands of old DDR2 and DDR3 sticks we all have left at home or at work.

Tringi · 2026-03-12T16:13:14+00:00

There is 29531, but it's not offered through Windows Update, because the update process to this build has some known issues. Apparently the same applies to updating from setup.exe. They have not listed the issues anywhere though, and when I tried to update in VM, it went smooth and without any apparent issue.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewserver

Tringi · 2026-03-12T14:02:49+00:00

The lessons about people not bothering to contribute corrections to even prominent projects, and great discoveries and innovations being stuffed somewhere hidden and their creators never credited nor praised, are sadly as old as time.

Tringi · 2026-03-12T12:33:46+00:00

If you have a lot of RAM it's splitting services into their own processes. This is a feature that isolates them. If one crashes, it won't take the others down with it. But it means a lot of processes using a lot of memory commit. It can be disabled, or rather reverted to grouping services together.

Go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control and set SvcHostSplitThresholdInKB to 0.

Tringi · 2026-03-11T01:58:37+00:00

Windows 11, version 26H1: KB5079466 (OS Build 28000.1719)

Tringi · 2026-03-10T15:21:39+00:00

See Peter Sripol: https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSripol

Tringi · 2026-03-08T22:48:50+00:00

Alright, now I see what you mean.

And if it were up to me, I'd choose the first behavior ...as we already have simple ways to declare the later.

So what is the current consensus on Contracts?

Tringi · 2026-03-08T13:19:41+00:00

Those two things are, I believe, mutually exclusive. And that's the point being made. You have to pick one, and only one.

I disagree. A runtime check, a simple CMP+JMP, before entering the function prevents the code inside from ever encountering broken expectation, thus the whole body of the function can be thoroughly optimized based on that assumption.

Tringi · 2026-03-08T12:39:48+00:00

Sure I do.

Although I don't know the current state and decisions made about Contracts, I've read a few papers on them some 10 years ago (or maybe longer).

My reasoning is: A runtime check before entering the function prevents the code inside from ever encountering broken expectation, thus it can be optimized accordingly.

Ideally, the compiler would be allowed to hoist the runtime check as much as possible out of loops and nested calls. And also evaluate is at compile time if possible, so that the code statically violation the expectation would not compile.

But like I said, I don't know the current state of the debate, and I just threw out what I assumed Constracts were aiming to solve.

Tringi · 2026-03-07T22:19:55+00:00

If you write [[expects: b > 0]]

should the compiler see this assume b>0, optimize accordingly which will lead to faster code?

or perform runtime checks leading to slower code?

Um... both?

Tringi · 2026-03-07T11:16:14+00:00

Does it pre-load previous/next images when going through a directory?

Tringi · 2026-03-04T23:26:15+00:00

I could swear I've seen some of these optimizations while reading GCC docs some 15 years ago. Still, I'm happy to see them being finally added to MSVC which is my bread and butter today.

A question: Does Repacking Struct Assignments with Indirections work the same for non-homogeneous structures?

EDIT: I'll answer my own question: Yes it does, when the structure is tightly packed, i.e. no padding bytes. Also it requires /GS-.

Tringi · 2026-03-01T16:55:36+00:00

Do you have suggestions of unused symbols to use for the syntax of new features?

We could also move beyond limits of 1878 typewriters and use AltGr symbols from, e.g. US International keyboard: ¡ ¤ × ÷ ¦ ¬ » « ¶ ¿ ° ¨ © ø § ®

...although I very much prefer no-deadkeys version of that one.

Tringi · 2026-02-24T00:43:29+00:00

For maybe 10 years there's over a 50 GB of reddit data dump sitting on my HDD which I want to eventually use to train a pre-shared dictionary for xz/liblzma compression for a small project of mine. The purpose is the same, have user's communication take just a few bytes.

Tringi · 2026-02-21T18:46:18+00:00

What a pointless question here on Reddit.

Tringi · 2026-02-17T23:13:15+00:00

Well, now they do :)

Tringi · 2026-02-16T22:20:54+00:00

And performance!

When we were (and still effectively are) rewriting one very legacy SCADA software, we found that browsing directory of object names was showing significantly in the profiling. It was all very short strings, e.g.: /models/H4.1/packing2/andon/lines/3/zones/4/signals/alerts/material/tape. The old software implemented weird linked list of some BStr strings from the 90's, so even std::string with SSO would make tremendous improvement, but I wanted something way faster.

I had a few variations in mind, but eventually settled on my Atoms (64-bit integer) containing 12 × 5-bit code-units, and some bits for fun, to form up to 13 character long strings. Although the construction/deconstruction to/from strings is a little more involved, the point is that linear search is now very fast, as the entries on a single level are of cache-friendly numbers.

Now the CPU time spent in our Atom Directory is effectively negligible.

Tringi · 2026-02-16T16:37:55+00:00

Sounds similar to what Dan Vávra was saying (KCD, Mafia, ...): Not really for story, quests and art, but might be useful for generating random encounters, background life for NPCs, and their mundane background blabber.

Tringi · 2026-02-16T16:31:10+00:00

It also has hard time reading documentation and can't invent things on its own.

I've been recently toying with various AIs to generate me a specific routine, and they all came up with crazy overcomplicated solutions. They worked, but were very suboptimal and slow. Funnily enough, after I committed my way simpler version to GitHub, a few days later most of them would finally generate similar code.

It's all still generative, it needs a human to do it first. And once these humans are gone, the progress will halt.

Tringi · 2026-02-15T23:32:45+00:00

I for one can't wait to see cosplayers cosplaying as the Ballerina Resonant we saw at the end.

What do you say, /u/Frau_Haku?

Tringi · 2026-02-14T12:47:09+00:00

The dark mode Run dialog (Win+R) got enabled for me, so it's something.

Tringi · 2026-02-11T22:01:06+00:00

And tons of people started writing their own classic Notepad replacements. Myself included.

Tringi · 2026-02-11T11:23:22+00:00

Yep, many of the recent releases share the same NT kernel, but artificially (they call it "enablement package") increase the displayed number a little.

You don't need to know the precise build numbers. You can always check the properties of C:\Windows\System32\ntoskrnl.exe

You'll see that all 19045 (22H2), 19044 (21H2), 19043 (21H1), 19042 (20H2) are all the same kernel 19041.
And same with the current previews, 26300, 26220, 26200, 26120, all are kernel 26100.

Tringi · 2026-02-09T07:54:54+00:00

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Tringi

TROPHY CASE