6 ms·

Rust on macOS 9

134 points by zdw 4y ago

mattl 4y ago
Mac OS 9 Apple didn’t start calling it macOS until years after iOS was a thing and iOS was called OS X and iPhone OS first.
- shawnbaden 4y ago
  https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/mac-os-x https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/mac-os-x
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Actually, OS X was short for Mac OS X, where "X" was the roman numeral "10". In a way, the name never changed.
  - mattl 4y ago
    Um actually, OS X was a distinct branding from Mac OS X.
  - TwiceCubed 4y ago
    You're confidently incorrect. If you weren't paying attention at the time, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article. This isn't hard to check. "OS X" was the official name for five years, from 2011-2016. It wasn't short for anything. The "Mac" prefix had been officially removed from it for that time. This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      I disagree with Wikipedia's framing. There wasn't some sort of major rebrand in 2011, Apple just stopped writing "Mac" at the start of the name. Old-timers knew what it stood for. It's like how "Mac" is still short for "Macintosh", even though Apple basically never uses the full name anymore.
      - TwiceCubed 4y ago
        They didn't "just stop writing it" in some contexts. They started registering trademarks that explicitly didn't include it, and then they went back. The trademark for "OS X" on its own was approved in November 2011, and then Apple started using it on its own. Their other trademark registrations (e.g. USPTO TM SN 86097345 OS X Mavericks) continued in that form, until their registration for "macOS" was approved and they changed back (e.g. USPTO TM SN 87534929 macOS High Sierra). You can have your etymology and your opinion, but as far as Apple and the government are concerned, the fact is that the official name was just "OS X". Wikipedia is correct, and this was also the understanding among Apple fans at the time.
      - metadat 4y ago
        Thanks for the correction. Deleted.
        hedgehog 4y ago
        Your memory is incorrect. The branding sequence was System (from before I remember up to 7.5) -> Mac OS (7.6 to 9) -> Mac OS X (10.0 to ??) -> OS X (??) -> macOS (starting after 2015). Edit: Sibling comment from htimsenyawed looks right to me.
        htimsenyawed 4y ago
        macOS was originally Mac OS X and short referenced as OS X. The official name change from Mac OS X to macOS began with release 10.12 Sierra, the previous version was called Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The transition to macOS from Mac OS X occurred in 2016 as that was the year that Sierra was announced and released.
        Nition 4y ago
        I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as OS X, is in fact, Mac OS X, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, macOS.
        panzi 4y ago
        Also, and I'm not sure if I remember that correctly, I think during "Mac OS X" times they said it is pronounced as "mac OS ten", because X is the roman numeral for 10. Wikipedia has references about it where Apple themselves even back then used either pronunciation, though. Also a reference that says while it stands for 10 it also references the X commonly found in many Unix things because of the Unix roots of Mac OS X.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ahoya 4y ago
      A rare inverted confidentally incorrect, when someone claims (incorrectly and with great confidence) that someone else is confidently incorrect.
    - timeon 4y ago
      > This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up. This is like telling someone who is called Louis that his actual name is Hlodowig.
    - arp242 4y ago
      It was released as "Mac OS X", and then later shortened/rebranded to just "OS X". Unless you want to argue that the etymology of "OS X" is completely unrelated to "Mac OS X" and is merely coincidentally very similar, the statement "OS X was short for Mac OS X" is correct by all but the most pedantic definition.
      - TwiceCubed 4y ago
        [dead]
  - asveikau 4y ago
    I think they didn't start calling it Mac OS until 7.5 or so. Before that it was "system 7", "system 6", etc.
- chongli 4y ago
  Here’s the startup screen from MacOS 8 [1] which came out in 1997, more than a decade before the iPhone came out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_os_8_splash_screen.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_os_8_splash_screen.pn...
  - catach 4y ago
    Very clearly a space there between the "Mac" and "OS".
  - einherjae 4y ago
    Capital M vs lower case m. Apple loves their first letters to be lowercase.
pcwalton 4y ago
The title undersells it: this means that Rust can now compile to C89, by first compiling to WebAssembly and then compiling that WebAssembly to C. This addresses one of the major concerns about Rust (and LLVM, for that matter) that I see brought up again and again here: compatibility with obscure systems that only have a C89 compiler available.
- userbinator 4y ago
  by first compiling to WebAssembly and then compiling that WebAssembly to C That's a really indirect way, and it's not clear how much efficiency is lost in the process. It's not too far from claiming that $language can be used on a microcontroller, because $language exists on Linux, and the latter can run Linux even if via extremely slow emulation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762928 Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010159
  - hedgehog 4y ago
    According to the w2c2 readme "Coremark 1.0: ~7% slower than native" so within the generated code performance sounds quite good. What I'm curious about is how hard it is to build a library target via this method and how much overhead there is in calling the generated code. Maybe someone who knows WebAssembly has some idea? Do call parameters need to get turned into JSON and back? Can I pass in a pointer to writable memory?
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      'Primitive types' like integers and floats can be passed to the other side directly as function parameters without marshalling. For memory access I can only describe how it works in the browser environment with Emscripten (for lack of experience with other WASM integrations): The WASM heap is exposed as a Javascript ArrayBuffer object (or more correctly that ArrayBuffer object is the WASM heap, created on the JS side and handed to the WASM side at startup), with per-primitive-type array views (for instance for byte access there's a global "HEAPU8: Uint8Array" object on the JS side). Since WASM currently only has 32-bit pointers, pointers can be passed safely to the Javascript side as JS 'numbers' without loss of information. This 'number pointer' can then be used as array index to read and write data in the WASM heap from the JS side. Don't know how it works in WASM engines outside the browser, but I suppose it's similar (e.g. a shared heap between the native side and WASM), except maybe that you can also pass 64-bit integers around without data loss. But in no case there needs to be any JSON- or Protobuf-style 'parameter serialization' involved. This old blog post might contain some more information: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-and-webassembly-are-finally-fast-%F0%9F%8E%89/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-a...
ivraatiems 4y ago
I've been working for some time on getting a modern-ish (really, modern-SSL-supporting) browser running on my Mac OS 9.1 iMac G3. My initial approach has been to try to a version of Classzilla[0] with support for more modern encryption. I wonder if I've been overthinking it. Surely, I could just compile Firefox or Chromium source to WASM, compile that with this tool, and then have a fully working browser! What could possibly go wrong? [0] https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/
- cassepipe 4y ago
  I had until recently an G5 PowerPC Imac I installed Linux on (Void-ppc linux) and the Linux on Powerpc community people have developped a firefox fork (Arctic Fox) which was working well but the real problem is that is was quite slow, single-core CPUS can't stand modern browsing. Blog reading was fine but anything else took more time than I was ready to wait for. I wanted to make it a no distraction machine to run vim in and read documentation but the machine maintenance was itself a distraction in the end.
teeeeeegz 4y ago
What was the biggest difference from a consumer perspective when moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X? I was too young to remember, but do recall the Win 98/ME → XP upgrade being a huge headache, and was wondering whether people faced similar teething issues.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  Mac OS 9 and earlier were fully custom whereas Mac OS X is UNIX based on Darwin (a BSD). Some versions of OS X are fully UNIX-certified.
  - haunter 4y ago
    >Some versions of OS X are fully UNIX-certified Everything since 10.5 Leopard (2007) https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      Interesting. I thought I saw somewhere that Apple stopped applying macOS for some certification, but it looks like the latest versions of macOS definitely have UNIX certification. Maybe what I saw was about POSIX certification, but it's shockingly hard to find definitive info on that online. I can find the list of UNIX-certified operating systems, but not the list of POSIX-certified operating systems, at least not from an authoritative source. The latest version of macOS is POSIX-certified but I can't tell if there were any gaps between 10.5 and now. Maybe the info I saw was total bogus.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  A lot. Much bigger interface differences than 98 to XP, many programs required "Classic" mode to run essentially a Mac OS 9 VM. Some programs like games ran like arse in Classic mode so you had to dual boot to get decent performance. Plus the first several Mac OS X versions weren't exactly quick on hardware designed with classic Mac OS in mind like the iMac G3. But it looked a lot better and wouldn't crash all the time.
donatj 4y ago
Does this imply I could port anything I can compile to WASM to MacOS 9 this way? Cough Go cough.

134 points by zdw 4y ago

Mac OS 9 Apple didn’t start calling it macOS until years after iOS was a thing and iOS was called OS X and iPhone OS first.

shawnbaden 4y ago
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/mac-os-x https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/mac-os-x
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Actually, OS X was short for Mac OS X, where "X" was the roman numeral "10". In a way, the name never changed.
- mattl 4y ago
  Um actually, OS X was a distinct branding from Mac OS X.
- TwiceCubed 4y ago
  You're confidently incorrect. If you weren't paying attention at the time, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article. This isn't hard to check. "OS X" was the official name for five years, from 2011-2016. It wasn't short for anything. The "Mac" prefix had been officially removed from it for that time. This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    I disagree with Wikipedia's framing. There wasn't some sort of major rebrand in 2011, Apple just stopped writing "Mac" at the start of the name. Old-timers knew what it stood for. It's like how "Mac" is still short for "Macintosh", even though Apple basically never uses the full name anymore.
    - TwiceCubed 4y ago
      They didn't "just stop writing it" in some contexts. They started registering trademarks that explicitly didn't include it, and then they went back. The trademark for "OS X" on its own was approved in November 2011, and then Apple started using it on its own. Their other trademark registrations (e.g. USPTO TM SN 86097345 OS X Mavericks) continued in that form, until their registration for "macOS" was approved and they changed back (e.g. USPTO TM SN 87534929 macOS High Sierra). You can have your etymology and your opinion, but as far as Apple and the government are concerned, the fact is that the official name was just "OS X". Wikipedia is correct, and this was also the understanding among Apple fans at the time.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Thanks for the correction. Deleted.
      - hedgehog 4y ago
        Your memory is incorrect. The branding sequence was System (from before I remember up to 7.5) -> Mac OS (7.6 to 9) -> Mac OS X (10.0 to ??) -> OS X (??) -> macOS (starting after 2015). Edit: Sibling comment from htimsenyawed looks right to me.
      - htimsenyawed 4y ago
        macOS was originally Mac OS X and short referenced as OS X. The official name change from Mac OS X to macOS began with release 10.12 Sierra, the previous version was called Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The transition to macOS from Mac OS X occurred in 2016 as that was the year that Sierra was announced and released.
        Nition 4y ago
        I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as OS X, is in fact, Mac OS X, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, macOS.
        panzi 4y ago
        Also, and I'm not sure if I remember that correctly, I think during "Mac OS X" times they said it is pronounced as "mac OS ten", because X is the roman numeral for 10. Wikipedia has references about it where Apple themselves even back then used either pronunciation, though. Also a reference that says while it stands for 10 it also references the X commonly found in many Unix things because of the Unix roots of Mac OS X.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ahoya 4y ago
    A rare inverted confidentally incorrect, when someone claims (incorrectly and with great confidence) that someone else is confidently incorrect.
  - timeon 4y ago
    > This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up. This is like telling someone who is called Louis that his actual name is Hlodowig.
  - arp242 4y ago
    It was released as "Mac OS X", and then later shortened/rebranded to just "OS X". Unless you want to argue that the etymology of "OS X" is completely unrelated to "Mac OS X" and is merely coincidentally very similar, the statement "OS X was short for Mac OS X" is correct by all but the most pedantic definition.
    - TwiceCubed 4y ago
      [dead]
- asveikau 4y ago
  I think they didn't start calling it Mac OS until 7.5 or so. Before that it was "system 7", "system 6", etc.
chongli 4y ago
Here’s the startup screen from MacOS 8 [1] which came out in 1997, more than a decade before the iPhone came out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_os_8_splash_screen.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_os_8_splash_screen.pn...
- catach 4y ago
  Very clearly a space there between the "Mac" and "OS".
- einherjae 4y ago
  Capital M vs lower case m. Apple loves their first letters to be lowercase.

pcwalton 4y ago

The title undersells it: this means that Rust can now compile to C89, by first compiling to WebAssembly and then compiling that WebAssembly to C. This addresses one of the major concerns about Rust (and LLVM, for that matter) that I see brought up again and again here: compatibility with obscure systems that only have a C89 compiler available.

userbinator 4y ago
by first compiling to WebAssembly and then compiling that WebAssembly to C That's a really indirect way, and it's not clear how much efficiency is lost in the process. It's not too far from claiming that $language can be used on a microcontroller, because $language exists on Linux, and the latter can run Linux even if via extremely slow emulation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762928 Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010159
- hedgehog 4y ago
  According to the w2c2 readme "Coremark 1.0: ~7% slower than native" so within the generated code performance sounds quite good. What I'm curious about is how hard it is to build a library target via this method and how much overhead there is in calling the generated code. Maybe someone who knows WebAssembly has some idea? Do call parameters need to get turned into JSON and back? Can I pass in a pointer to writable memory?
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    'Primitive types' like integers and floats can be passed to the other side directly as function parameters without marshalling. For memory access I can only describe how it works in the browser environment with Emscripten (for lack of experience with other WASM integrations): The WASM heap is exposed as a Javascript ArrayBuffer object (or more correctly that ArrayBuffer object is the WASM heap, created on the JS side and handed to the WASM side at startup), with per-primitive-type array views (for instance for byte access there's a global "HEAPU8: Uint8Array" object on the JS side). Since WASM currently only has 32-bit pointers, pointers can be passed safely to the Javascript side as JS 'numbers' without loss of information. This 'number pointer' can then be used as array index to read and write data in the WASM heap from the JS side. Don't know how it works in WASM engines outside the browser, but I suppose it's similar (e.g. a shared heap between the native side and WASM), except maybe that you can also pass 64-bit integers around without data loss. But in no case there needs to be any JSON- or Protobuf-style 'parameter serialization' involved. This old blog post might contain some more information: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-and-webassembly-are-finally-fast-%F0%9F%8E%89/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-a...

ivraatiems 4y ago

I've been working for some time on getting a modern-ish (really, modern-SSL-supporting) browser running on my Mac OS 9.1 iMac G3. My initial approach has been to try to a version of Classzilla[0] with support for more modern encryption. I wonder if I've been overthinking it. Surely, I could just compile Firefox or Chromium source to WASM, compile that with this tool, and then have a fully working browser! What could possibly go wrong? [0] https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ https://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/

cassepipe 4y ago
I had until recently an G5 PowerPC Imac I installed Linux on (Void-ppc linux) and the Linux on Powerpc community people have developped a firefox fork (Arctic Fox) which was working well but the real problem is that is was quite slow, single-core CPUS can't stand modern browsing. Blog reading was fine but anything else took more time than I was ready to wait for. I wanted to make it a no distraction machine to run vim in and read documentation but the machine maintenance was itself a distraction in the end.

teeeeeegz 4y ago

What was the biggest difference from a consumer perspective when moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X? I was too young to remember, but do recall the Win 98/ME → XP upgrade being a huge headache, and was wondering whether people faced similar teething issues.

LoganDark 4y ago
Mac OS 9 and earlier were fully custom whereas Mac OS X is UNIX based on Darwin (a BSD). Some versions of OS X are fully UNIX-certified.
- haunter 4y ago
  >Some versions of OS X are fully UNIX-certified Everything since 10.5 Leopard (2007) https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    Interesting. I thought I saw somewhere that Apple stopped applying macOS for some certification, but it looks like the latest versions of macOS definitely have UNIX certification. Maybe what I saw was about POSIX certification, but it's shockingly hard to find definitive info on that online. I can find the list of UNIX-certified operating systems, but not the list of POSIX-certified operating systems, at least not from an authoritative source. The latest version of macOS is POSIX-certified but I can't tell if there were any gaps between 10.5 and now. Maybe the info I saw was total bogus.
goosedragons 4y ago
A lot. Much bigger interface differences than 98 to XP, many programs required "Classic" mode to run essentially a Mac OS 9 VM. Some programs like games ran like arse in Classic mode so you had to dual boot to get decent performance. Plus the first several Mac OS X versions weren't exactly quick on hardware designed with classic Mac OS in mind like the iMac G3. But it looked a lot better and wouldn't crash all the time.

donatj 4y ago

Does this imply I could port anything I can compile to WASM to MacOS 9 this way? Cough Go cough.