Microsoft at least used to famously “eat your own dog food “ during development of new Windows versions. This means that the developers themselves had to install the latest build and then use that while continuing development. This could lead to longer delays when crucial parts didn’t work.
AFAIK this trend started with David Cutler (legendary developer) and the development of the original Windows NT. You still need a fair bit of building blocks developed individually before you have something large enough to assembly to a build.
In those days, they sat mostly on OS/2 while developing parts for the kernel and boot system etc. Then some specifically precarious items to roll into the build and have everyone start using was networking, file system, and graphical interface. Bugs here hampered everyone (like, how do you create a new build of windows with new parts when networking / sharing files doesn’t work?).
Today I’ll imagine more development is performed on VMs so that it’s much less noisy when stuff doesn’t work. I’m sure at lot of developers still willingly or not install the version they are working on. However, it will probably be a little later with more working parts, and not updating every day etc.
Microsoft at least used to famously “eat your own dog food “ during development of new Windows versions. This means that the developers themselves had to install the latest build and then use that while continuing development. This could lead to longer delays when crucial parts didn’t work.
AFAIK this trend started with David Cutler (legendary developer) and the development of the original Windows NT. You still need a fair bit of building blocks developed individually before you have something large enough to assembly to a build.
In those days, they sat mostly on OS/2 while developing parts for the kernel and boot system etc. Then some specifically precarious items to roll into the build and have everyone start using was networking, file system, and graphical interface. Bugs here hampered everyone (like, how do you create a new build of windows with new parts when networking / sharing files doesn’t work?).
Today I’ll imagine more development is performed on VMs so that it’s much less noisy when stuff doesn’t work. I’m sure at lot of developers still willingly or not install the version they are working on. However, it will probably be a little later with more working parts, and not updating every day etc.