Comment Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score 1) 342
Funny how some things fail to get mentioned.
One, a good reason for porting and cross-developing software -- including OS software -- is that it provides a relatively easy quality test: the better the abstraction from the underlying, and the fewer assumptions based on that creep into production code, the more robust, reliable and maintainable the code.
Darwin, or its predecessors, have always been built for Intel. As well as several other platforms. This has also been relatively simple: hardware abstraction is, to a great extent, offered by the microkernel. There simply is no driver purgatory like there is in monolithic OSes.
Drivers are an important issue. Writing them is a pain. It's difficult and hazardous, and, on OSes of a lesser design device drivers put the entire system at risk. On OS X, however, you get full driver protection, and a high-level development environment for drivers and kernel extensions on the side; and these can be added, or removed, from a running kernel, just like that.
I'll have that, thanks. No thanks, you can keep your monolithic, russian-roulette spaghetti-coded Unix lookalikes; I'd rather go for the real thing, with a solid architecture at its core and an unrivalled contemporary development environment-cum-frameworks (ProjectBuilder, Interface Builder, Object Modeler, Foundation Kit, AppKit) to go. It compiles (and runs) everything Unix as is, but more importantly, it goes way, way beyond. And '70s Unix may be good enough for some, but well, it's just '70s Unix to me. More, please, but more importantly: better, please. An environment that values *my* time, please. Yes, I'll order a few. To go. Make it snappy, please.
Thanks.
One, a good reason for porting and cross-developing software -- including OS software -- is that it provides a relatively easy quality test: the better the abstraction from the underlying, and the fewer assumptions based on that creep into production code, the more robust, reliable and maintainable the code.
Darwin, or its predecessors, have always been built for Intel. As well as several other platforms. This has also been relatively simple: hardware abstraction is, to a great extent, offered by the microkernel. There simply is no driver purgatory like there is in monolithic OSes.
Drivers are an important issue. Writing them is a pain. It's difficult and hazardous, and, on OSes of a lesser design device drivers put the entire system at risk. On OS X, however, you get full driver protection, and a high-level development environment for drivers and kernel extensions on the side; and these can be added, or removed, from a running kernel, just like that.
I'll have that, thanks. No thanks, you can keep your monolithic, russian-roulette spaghetti-coded Unix lookalikes; I'd rather go for the real thing, with a solid architecture at its core and an unrivalled contemporary development environment-cum-frameworks (ProjectBuilder, Interface Builder, Object Modeler, Foundation Kit, AppKit) to go. It compiles (and runs) everything Unix as is, but more importantly, it goes way, way beyond. And '70s Unix may be good enough for some, but well, it's just '70s Unix to me. More, please, but more importantly: better, please. An environment that values *my* time, please. Yes, I'll order a few. To go. Make it snappy, please.
Thanks.
