4 ms·

I'm very curious what would have happen if Apple had bought Be instead. On one hand it was a much modern OS because build from scratch in the 90's rather based

• mpweiher 9y ago
  Interestingly they had a modern OS kernel, Mach to be exact, with a BSD personality running on top of it (in kernel space). After the acquisition, use of Mach wasn't expanded (never got our user-level pagers, for example, or BSD running as a user-level service), but instead pushed back. Supposedly largely for performance reasons, but of course the L4 kernel showed that didn't need to be the case.
  • AceJohnny2 9y ago
    > After the acquisition, use of Mach wasn't expanded I believe modern XPC services integrated with launchd to allow on-demand job launching (similar to Linux dbus-activation?) are based on Mach 'ports' (IPC). And tangentially, launchd "domains" (gui/user/system) are based on Mach "bootstrap domains", which is why a job launched in the background ("user") may have trouble communicating with a job launched in the GUI domain, if you're just assuming Unix permissions.
• simonh 9y ago
  Apple had two problems at the time. One was technology and the other was leadership. Be would have helped with the technology part, but in an incomplete way. It wasn’t just the core OS NEXT provided, but also the application development stack. Be wouldn’t have helped on the leadership front at all though. The Mac certainly benefited from attracting a lot of Unix devs, but I don’t think that was a significant contributor to its mainstream success.
• askvictor 9y ago
  Iirc beos did have a POSIX layer.