You also have to remember that the WinSock API had to be implemented on cooperatively multitasked Windows 3.x. So some of the weirdness is due to that - async socket IO had to work in that environment.
There’s some story I heard at Build or another conference about them implementing sockets on Windows NT. I think maybe it was Larry Osterman who had to
implement them. His boss told him to do it without another ***ing driver and tried but couldn’t do it. So the driver implementing sockets was AFD.SYS
I think that’s well behaved with respect to WriteFile, ReadFile etc. One thing they did get right is using sockets with IO completion ports. That was a great design.
There’s some story I heard at Build or another conference about them implementing sockets on Windows NT. I think maybe it was Larry Osterman who had to implement them. His boss told him to do it without another ***ing driver and tried but couldn’t do it. So the driver implementing sockets was AFD.SYS
I think that’s well behaved with respect to WriteFile, ReadFile etc. One thing they did get right is using sockets with IO completion ports. That was a great design.