Breaking backwards compatiblity

[so]

On Saturday, 10 March 2012 at 16:22:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> OK, clearly I wasn't understanding what the OP was talking 
> about. It
> *seemed* to imply that Linux had stop-the-world problems with 
> mouse
> movement, but this isn't the case.
>
> A hardware interrupt is a hardware interrupt. Whatever OS 
> you're using,
> it's got to stop to handle this somehow. I don't see how else 
> you can do
> this. When the hardware needs to signal the OS about something, 
> it's
> gotta do it somehow. And hardware often requires top-priority
> stop-the-world handling, because it may not be able to wait a 
> few
> milliseconds before it's handled. It's not like software that 
> generally
> can afford to wait for a period of time.
>
> As for Win95 being unable to keep up with mouse movement... 
> well, to be
> honest I hated Win95 so much that 90% of the time I was in the 
> DOS
> prompt anyway, so I didn't even notice this. If it were truly a 
> problem,
> it's probably a sign of poor hardware interrupt handling 
> (interrupt
> handler is taking too long to process events). But I haven't 
> seen this
> myself either.

Design of input handling, the theoretical part is irrelevant. I 
was solely talking about how they do it in practice. OSs are 
simply unresponsive and in linux it is more severe. If i am 
having this issue in practice it doesn't matter if it was the GC 
lock or an another failure to handle input.