Comment THIS is the "new" and exciting bit in OSX! (Score 2, Interesting) 223
You don't really know much about OS X.
First, it's a mach kernel that can act like BSD.
Big difference.
And, it's not really the UNIX part that's so interesting.
It's nice to have as a foundation.
The beauty of OSX is its completely object-oriented layers above UNIX.
Written in Objective-C, a decent mixture between plain C and smalltalk, it lets you write VERY dynamic code.
You have services (one program can offer its capabilities to other programs). Say, one program can open and read PNG files. Sudenly all programs can handle them...
Everything is an object, can send/receive messages etc. And objects can be changed at runtime (say, you can modify the GUI of an compiled program, and even add buttons that connect to objects within the code..!!!)
Look at the really small software shops that crack out incredible code (omni, stone etc.). Not possible without these layers and APIs
This is the "new" bit about OSX.
But this was all developed by NeXT in 1989-93.
So it's not THAT new, but being lightyears ahead back then,
it's still an armlength away from all the other OSes right now.
This makes OSX exciting.
And this is exactly the part that is NOT open sourced at Apple ;-)
Cheers, Martin
First, it's a mach kernel that can act like BSD.
Big difference.
And, it's not really the UNIX part that's so interesting.
It's nice to have as a foundation.
The beauty of OSX is its completely object-oriented layers above UNIX.
Written in Objective-C, a decent mixture between plain C and smalltalk, it lets you write VERY dynamic code.
You have services (one program can offer its capabilities to other programs). Say, one program can open and read PNG files. Sudenly all programs can handle them...
Everything is an object, can send/receive messages etc. And objects can be changed at runtime (say, you can modify the GUI of an compiled program, and even add buttons that connect to objects within the code..!!!)
Look at the really small software shops that crack out incredible code (omni, stone etc.). Not possible without these layers and APIs
This is the "new" bit about OSX.
But this was all developed by NeXT in 1989-93.
So it's not THAT new, but being lightyears ahead back then,
it's still an armlength away from all the other OSes right now.
This makes OSX exciting.
And this is exactly the part that is NOT open sourced at Apple
Cheers, Martin
