Most of the Mac OS X libraries are closed-source, just like Windows' libraries - so you'd need as much reverse-engineering to get Mac OS programs to run on Linux as you would to get WINE working.Īnd Apple's hacked-up, mish-mashy hybrid of kernels is probably not going to make things much easier for developers - sure, there's a /dev directory that contains familiar device files, but all that could easily be emulated on a non-POSIX kernel anyway. Not one single line of Firefox's source code actually sends any messages directly to the kernel all the messages go to libraries.
So, you see, the kernel only starts the chain of messages. So X sends the keypress event to GTK, and GTK may send it to Firefox. The X server notices that the active window belongs to Firefox, and that the GTK library is waiting for keypress events. Glibc tells the X server that the key has been pressed. The kernel actually tells the "glibc" library that a key has been pressed. The Linux kernel isn't telling Firefox "Right, the user hit this key". A normal program doesn't communicate directly with the kernel, it communicates with middlemen known as "libraries" and "servers".įor instance, I'm running Firefox right now, typing into this message. The kernel handles really low-level stuff - loading things into memory, providing a way for programs to interface with the hardware, that sort of thing. People don't quite seem to understand what a kernel does. Reason: Changing to the quote that it is. Last edited by blueraven March 13th, 2007 at 05:26 AM. It needs some edge up from MS, since most of its ideas, while good, seem to pale in comparison to MS's amoral monopoly.Īnd yes, I'll probably get flamed for this How else would it come up with new ideas to suck money out of our wallets?Īs for my opinion, I say let Apple be. We wouldn't want to see such an innovative company go down, and neither does Microsoft. The kernel is another story (there's a reason why a program on OS X can run on both PPC and X86 while still being in one file ) I think it would be a lot of hard work to get the ls command to work.Īpple is a company. the Toolkit) and has only came to the form we know now when Apple needed a transition API for their old programmers. Carbon, on the other hand, uses old code used on classic Macs (i.e.
Cocoa uses Objective C and was used on the NeXT cube. Not to mention that there are two main APIs at work on OS X: Cocoa and Carbon. If someone ported it to Windows, they would sue on copyright infringement and other things. Unlike Linux, OS X's GUI (Aqua) is not open-source. Great idea, but other than the technical reasons why it's not done, there's the legal.
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