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An Answer To "What is Mac OS X?"

Posted by Cliff on from the for-those-who-are-curious dept.

XCube writes: "'What is Mac OS X?' is a fascinating article over at KernelThread.com. According to Amit Singh it's a hacker-over-friendly answer to that question and a low-level taste of Apple's OS. The extensive article covers many details on Mac OS X: history, Mac firmware & boot loader, system architecture, kernel, startup, file systems, app environments, programming facilities, available software, and more. A great read if you are interested in Mac OS X, though some stuff is too technical methinks. On second thought, this may be a better read if you're *not* interested in Mac OS X! The author says he wrote it to introduce Mac OS X to the Linux User's Group at his work."

3 of 664 comments (clear)

  1. interesting article... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's good to explain more of the underpinnings OS X. You see, NeXTSTEP was almost the perfect operating system and development environment.

    The NS environment (living on in Aqua today) is just so cool. Well-designed interfaces abound. Design patterns everywhere, created when the term "Design Pattern" had barely been explored in the computer world. For instance: most objects use delegation to extend their behavior. Not subclassing! Just compare building a GUI in Swing to Cocoa, it's like salt and sugar.

    Objective-C is a wonderful semi-dynamic language, much nicer than C++.

    Programming the mac is a true joy, even if all this dynamic dispatch is a little slow and hardly anybody uses macs. :-)

  2. Re:Carbon's roots are older by frankie · · Score: 5, Informative
    The article is conflating two different things - either an accidental mis-edit or an intentional oversimplification.

    Carbon is based on the classic Mac APIs which go way back to 1984, while the Carbon API actually exists (and is available for calls) in MacOS 8.1 and higher via the CarbonLib classic extension.

  3. Re:Carbon's roots are older by gwernol · · Score: 5, Informative

    Carbon is based on the classic Mac APIs which go way back to 1984, while the Carbon API actually exists (and is available for calls) in MacOS 8.1 and higher via the CarbonLib classic extension.

    Actually (if you care about all the historical details of Mac OS X's evolution) Carbon was originally based on the QuickTime library, which in turn was based on the classic Mac APIs. I was an engineer on the QuickTime team during the early Rhapsody days up through Mac OS X beta.

    When Rhapsody (basically the NextStep OS) was being developed it quickly became obvious we needed to support classic Macintosh applications. QuickTime had already been ported to an early Rhapsody version, and it just so happened QuickTime already carried around an API that contained about 70% of the Mac OS functionality. This is how QuickTime runs on Windows and why porting Carbon/classic Mac apps to Windows is (relatively) painless if you know to call the QTW libraries. So Apple effectively had the start of Carbon on NextStep as a result of the QuickTime port. Rhapsody became Mac OS X, the QuickTime library support was spun out to its own team and became Carbon.

    None of which really disagrees with your post, just a little more detail on the exact process.

    --
    Sailing over the event horizon