Windows Calculator is going open source

Can the combined power of the world’s developers possibly improve the iconic Windows Calculator app?

Microsoft is so sure they can that this week it posted the source code for one of the most used applications in history, on GitHub under an open source MIT License.

In a week when the NSA open-sourced all 1.2 million lines of code for its Ghidra reverse engineering tool, the Windows Calculator’s 35,000 lines of C++ might sound a bit puny by comparison.

But what Calculator lacks in size, it more than makes up for in the stature of having been in every version of Windows since version 1.0 in 1985.

It could be that the move is simply good PR, showcasing the company’s Damascene conversion to the idea of open source, coming only months after it offered up the admittedly ancient Windows File Manager on identical terms.

And then, as Microsoft blogs, there’s the fact that:

Reviewing the Calculator code is a great way to learn about the latest Microsoft technologies like the Universal Windows Platform, XAML, and Azure Pipelines.

Or perhaps Microsoft thinks it’ll be flooded with improvements for a program that’s already becoming weighed down with all sorts of clever features (using data conversion to usefully calculate that 1 Yobibyte is equivalent to 239.5 quadrillion DVDs, for example).