I've told this story before!
It used to be writing the outputs from the C/C++ preprocessor (.i files) to disk took forever (5+ minutes IIRC) with Microsoft's compilers. I asked one of the lead compiler developers why, and he waved me away saying it was just really complicated. Around that time a bunch of tools existed for GCC that worked with .i files, but none existed in the Microsoft ecosystem likely because writing .i files was so slow.
I was on the compiler test team at the time and we did lots of stuff with .i files, our tests were distributed across a large cluster of test machines (see my post about that https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested...) so it wasn't a big deal, but it still annoyed me.
One day I decided to find out what was going on, so I loaded up process monitor while outputting a .i file and watched what was happening. Much to my surprise, only 1 byte was being written at a time! No wonder writes were taking forever.
A quick dive into the source code revealed a comment above the file write call that read to the effect
// to work around a bug in windows 98
So anyway I opened a bug against the compiler saying we should probably fix that. :)
It used to be writing the outputs from the C/C++ preprocessor (.i files) to disk took forever (5+ minutes IIRC) with Microsoft's compilers. I asked one of the lead compiler developers why, and he waved me away saying it was just really complicated. Around that time a bunch of tools existed for GCC that worked with .i files, but none existed in the Microsoft ecosystem likely because writing .i files was so slow.
I was on the compiler test team at the time and we did lots of stuff with .i files, our tests were distributed across a large cluster of test machines (see my post about that https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/how-microsoft-tested...) so it wasn't a big deal, but it still annoyed me.
One day I decided to find out what was going on, so I loaded up process monitor while outputting a .i file and watched what was happening. Much to my surprise, only 1 byte was being written at a time! No wonder writes were taking forever.
A quick dive into the source code revealed a comment above the file write call that read to the effect
// to work around a bug in windows 98
So anyway I opened a bug against the compiler saying we should probably fix that. :)