OSNews > Thread > "RE[4]: Why?" by abraxas

PureDarwin Xmas Developer Preview Released

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 26th Dec 2008 11:58 UTC, submitted by probono

Most of you will know that the underlying core set of components of Mac OS X and the iPhone operating system are released under the Apple Public Source License, an FSF-approved open source license. Few of you, however, will have actually used Darwin in any other form than Mac OS X or the iPhone OS. Despite numerous projects attempting so, Darwin has never gained any significant traction apart from Apple's own interest. The PureDarwin project tries to rise from the ashes of the OpenDarwin project, and has just released a Christmas developer preview.

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RE[4]: Why?

by abraxas on Mon 29th Dec 2008 23:02 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Why?"

Member since:
2005-07-07

Except that GNUstep is an official GNU project; hell, RMS, himself, wrote the second iteration of the gnu-objc runtime. Yes, this was back during the NeXTstep/OPENSTEP days, but it being an official GNU project hasn't changed.

What is your point? Hurd is an official GNU project too but no one uses it.

And maybe have a filesystem that supports resource forks, etc? Oh, and isn't metadata-faith like -o softdep?

A lot more people are going to be interested in ZFS than HFS+. HFS+ isn't all that great compared to other modern filesystems.

Which is one of the fundamental problems with all of the BSD (and Linux!) kernels. I haven't seen anything that's modern and at the same time as good as Mach. Let's not even start with Windows....

Mach isn't that great. The only reason Darwin uses it is because it is a holdover from NextSTEP. Mach is actually a pretty big and old microkernel compared to what is available now. Even HURD dumped Mach for a smaller, better microkernel. I haven't read papers on exactly why or how Mach is better at power management. I don't think there is anything inherent in the architecture that allows it to be more efficient. I really can't complain about power consumption on Linux.

No, you have a system with multiple interfaces, traditional BSD (for Unix-compatibility) being one of them. Same deal as with NeXTstep. They aren't the focus of development, however, rather they provide *basic* services and/or compatibility.

Really? What other interface does Darwin have? I haven't seen anyone claim this. The XNU kernel is just a mishmash of Mach and BSD. You cannot seperate out the BSD functionality without writing new subsytems to take care of what BSD provides for XNU like IPC, TCP/IP, syscalls, VFS, crypto and many other things.

Because you're paying attention to one small part, and only one small part. Take your view as a Java developer -- everything has a JVM, why would you ever run something weird like OS X, or Linux, or Solaris, when you can run it on Windows!

That's not even remotely the same argument. I'm not saying you shouldn't use Darwin. I'm just asking WHO is going to use it? Especially when it doesn't seem to offer anything worthwhile to the majority of users and developers when they already have BSD.

No, and I'm not sure what the desire here is, myself. Apple doesn't release a lot of the drivers, etc, and many of the more interesting parts of OS X (e.g. Quartz) aren't OSS. Where it can benefit is for porters and developers who want to make their products run better on OS X (apache, mysql, etc. etc.). It also helps the packagers who try to provide cross-platform porting tools, like pkgsrc.

Finally a real reason! I never thought of that angle. It would probably be pretty nice to have Darwin in a VM or on another partition to test packages out for cross compatibility.

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