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I think it's somewhat to late for UNIX to evolve in general. There's too many decades of cruft and backwards compatibility built up. Afaict, most interesting n

I think it's somewhat to late for UNIX to evolve in general. There's too many decades of cruft and backwards compatibility built up. Afaict, most interesting new OS's being built right now are similar to UNIX, but very explicitly not.

trenchgun 5y ago
GNU is not UNIX, though.
marcodiego 5y ago
I don't know about UNIX per se, but consider Linux and MacOS progress in the last two decades. MacOS showed that it is possible for UNIX to be successful on the desktop. During the same period, Linux scaled from embedded computers and smartphones to supercomputers and servers. In terms of innovations, I'd bet MacOS has evolved too. Although "logical partitions"-like solutions were already known for some time, Linux made it widespread through containers; io_uring allows high throughput syscall-less zero-copy data transfer and futex2 allows to implement NT synchronization semantics that are very common in game development. All that ignoring just how much the desktop changed! The UNIX children are definitely not sitting still.
- Shared404 5y ago
  Good points all around, I stand corrected.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  I have always wondered what the world might be like if Apple had also focused big time on developing a server version of MacOS. I am very much not a fan of Apple as a company in general but I have always liked OSX quite a bit. Then again they would probably charge 10x as much for a 2U rackmount server where the main difference was a nice stainless steel front fascia...
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    They had two go's at it, A/UX and OS X Server, and ironically they do need servers for iCloud.
    - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
      What does iCloud run on?
      - ksec 5y ago
        Linux. I remember someone from IS&T said Apple even forbid the usage of MacOS in their cloud platform.
- astrange 5y ago
  macOS’s best POSIX-level innovations are probably sandbox, xpc/launchd, and libdispatch. These have been copied elsewhere as Capsicum, systemd, and libuv (TBB?), but the originals are more consistently used.
pjmlp 5y ago
To some extent you are right, however as POSIX actually won the server room it will stay around for decades to come, even when it is not fully exposed as you mention.

trenchgun 5y ago

GNU is not UNIX, though.

marcodiego 5y ago

I don't know about UNIX per se, but consider Linux and MacOS progress in the last two decades. MacOS showed that it is possible for UNIX to be successful on the desktop. During the same period, Linux scaled from embedded computers and smartphones to supercomputers and servers. In terms of innovations, I'd bet MacOS has evolved too. Although "logical partitions"-like solutions were already known for some time, Linux made it widespread through containers; io_uring allows high throughput syscall-less zero-copy data transfer and futex2 allows to implement NT synchronization semantics that are very common in game development. All that ignoring just how much the desktop changed! The UNIX children are definitely not sitting still.

Shared404 5y ago
Good points all around, I stand corrected.
Melatonic 5y ago
I have always wondered what the world might be like if Apple had also focused big time on developing a server version of MacOS. I am very much not a fan of Apple as a company in general but I have always liked OSX quite a bit. Then again they would probably charge 10x as much for a 2U rackmount server where the main difference was a nice stainless steel front fascia...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  They had two go's at it, A/UX and OS X Server, and ironically they do need servers for iCloud.
  - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
    What does iCloud run on?
    - ksec 5y ago
      Linux. I remember someone from IS&T said Apple even forbid the usage of MacOS in their cloud platform.
astrange 5y ago
macOS’s best POSIX-level innovations are probably sandbox, xpc/launchd, and libdispatch. These have been copied elsewhere as Capsicum, systemd, and libuv (TBB?), but the originals are more consistently used.

pjmlp 5y ago

To some extent you are right, however as POSIX actually won the server room it will stay around for decades to come, even when it is not fully exposed as you mention.