OSNews

> It surely is the case. MacOSX is a Unix.

But apparently not an "official" UNIX which is what this guy was saying. Not that I really care anyway. Like I said, being a UNIX based OS is nothing to fight over.

> Care to actually back your statements up, or do you just want to troll?

Sure. Go check out some papers on research operating systems. Let's see. UNIX is:

* fundamentally C based (ie no real OOP at the API level at all)

* Based on a pretty limited filing system concept, ie a file is simply a stream of bytes - if you look at some of the more advanced OS designs, they are based on concepts like transparent object persistance across storage and network boundaries. UNIX makes you do all this yourself. Files and directories are semantically separate, you can't treat them similarly. That's more due to history - originally filing systems were flat. The directory was invented as a new type of file later on.

* There is no standard object remoting system, unlike DCOM on Windows. MacOS has something called "distributed objects" but unlike DCOM it's not a full component solution, and iirc it's Cocoa only.

* Even the most advanced shells have an arcane and baroque syntax with highly limited feature set. I know this, I'm trying to write a full packaging framework in it :p

* ELF, the binary standard on virtually all forms of UNIX (but not macos x or AIX interestingly), has a number of misfeatures such as the old-skool static linking symbol scoping semantics. It also provides no framework for binary storage within the files itself, unlike PE on Windows. BTW MacOS X suffers here too, the best explanation for the wierdness of the MachO shlib model I've been given is "academics".

OK. I'd note that Windows and MacOS have similar problems to those given above, as well as strengths/weaknesses of their own.

So let's take MacOS X, which inherits many of the generic problems found in UNIX and Windows from above:

* MachO is just plain bizarre. The seemingly arbitrary distinction between "plugins" and "libraries" appears purposeless, or at least despite much looking I've yet to see a credible explanation for it. No other platform forces such a split on its users, and they don't suffer for it.

* Plays games with the normally well specified UNIX FS semantics. Of course stuff like KIO/GnomeVFS do this too. For instance, some FS objects appear to be files, at least in the user interface, but are actually directories. Nonetheless, you cannot write to such things.

* A mix of APIs, the implementation details of which are allowed to leak out into the user interface in obvious ways - if I had a pound for every time a Mac user has said "I wish program Foo was a Cocoa app".... of course on Linux this is a far bigger problem, but the general poorness of modern operating systems compared to the "competition" isn't really an excuse.

* General NeXT duffness wrt appfolders, which seem to be something of a failed experiment now as many Mac apps come with installers.

I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but you'll note that Windows, MacOS and Linux all get a thrashing from me Nothing is ever perfect of course.

However, use google power to find out more about OS research, and look for something called Genera from Symbolics for an interesting insight at the competition UNIX faced back in the day. UNIX won out over Lisp machines in the end for the same reason that PCs flattened Macs - they required specialist hardware (lisp-custom cpus), were expensive, proprietary etc etc.

Reading about advanced OS concepts is pretty interesting, it's too bad there aren't more articles about them here. Maybe I should write one some time......