4 ms·

Not much. I had a NeXT cube and the user + developer experience on my M1 Air is largely the same. More portable, obviously, and more colourful. Faster, but

Not much. I had a NeXT cube and the user + developer experience on my M1 Air is largely the same. More portable, obviously, and more colourful. Faster, but not nearly as much faster as it should be, IMHO. Well fortunately I write very little Swift, so at least compile performance is OK, and a lot of the user-noticeable speed improvements come from SSDs. > video streaming NeXTStep had NeXTtime, which IIRC was also important in sealing the Apple deal, as Be's big claim to fame was (multi-media) performance, with the for-the-time impressive demo of 4 videos playing simultaneously. Nobody had really thought of it before, but playing 4 videos was also not an issue in NT, so Be-blocked. https://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/AppleNeXT.htmld/present.html https://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/AppleNeXT.htmld/present.h...

KerrAvon 3y ago
I only have experience with OpenStep 4.x on PC hardware, but I feel like you may be vastly underplaying the speed gain from then to now, unless NeXTstep on black hardware really felt that much faster than on one of the blessed 486 configurations. I mean, NeXT was not known for speed, and this was the age of slow spinning rust or, for NeXT, even slower MO drives. I remember NeXTtime - it was essentially a prototype tech demo that could play some -- only some -- QuickTime movies in a very small window. I find it unlikely that it was significant in the deal. IIRC the Apple tech team wasn't that impressed with the interrupt latency of Mach, which later had to be fixed at Apple out of necessity.
worik 3y ago
> Not much. I had a NeXT cube and the user + developer experience on my M1 Air is largely the same. I recently (3 years ago) started developing on iOS and MacOS. I learnt programming on Mac Plus in the late 1980s early 1990s Wow, what a change. In the 1988-92 Macs were the bees knees for development. Really good. Now, definitely not. I regularly switch between Mac, Linux, and Windows for development. Development on iOS and MacOS is deeply painful. The tools are flash, lots of features, and they mostly work, that is they do not really work. Apple took US$99 from me for a license to write software for their machines, and now I cannot run my software on iOS unless I am connected to the Internet, so they can "verify" my license. (I never got the license - another sad story) Many times, regularly, the "verification" process goes awry and I spend time trying to work out which particular string of gobeldy gook I need to enter n which obscure part of Xcode to get the equipment I (my boss) paid for to do anything other than be dead weight. The flagship language (Swift) is half arsed. Some bits are OK, but the threading model is from the 1990s dressed in drag. Memory management by reference counting? Golly, how 1990s. Passing class parameters by reference as default, but not struct parameters - say what? Distributing the software we write to the users that need to use it is immensely painful, not my immediate problem, but I watch people in my firm tear their hair out trying to make it work. How the mighty have fallen.
- throw2291 3y ago
  [dead]
- amomchilov 3y ago
  Parameters of class type aren't passed by reference, either. Both instances of structs and instances of class are passed by value, except in the latter case the value being passed/copy is the reference. To pass by reference, you need `inout`.
  - worik 3y ago
    No. Classes are passed by reference. I still have trauma

KerrAvon 3y ago

I only have experience with OpenStep 4.x on PC hardware, but I feel like you may be vastly underplaying the speed gain from then to now, unless NeXTstep on black hardware really felt that much faster than on one of the blessed 486 configurations. I mean, NeXT was not known for speed, and this was the age of slow spinning rust or, for NeXT, even slower MO drives. I remember NeXTtime - it was essentially a prototype tech demo that could play some -- only some -- QuickTime movies in a very small window. I find it unlikely that it was significant in the deal. IIRC the Apple tech team wasn't that impressed with the interrupt latency of Mach, which later had to be fixed at Apple out of necessity.

worik 3y ago

> Not much. I had a NeXT cube and the user + developer experience on my M1 Air is largely the same. I recently (3 years ago) started developing on iOS and MacOS. I learnt programming on Mac Plus in the late 1980s early 1990s Wow, what a change. In the 1988-92 Macs were the bees knees for development. Really good. Now, definitely not. I regularly switch between Mac, Linux, and Windows for development. Development on iOS and MacOS is deeply painful. The tools are flash, lots of features, and they mostly work, that is they do not really work. Apple took US$99 from me for a license to write software for their machines, and now I cannot run my software on iOS unless I am connected to the Internet, so they can "verify" my license. (I never got the license - another sad story) Many times, regularly, the "verification" process goes awry and I spend time trying to work out which particular string of gobeldy gook I need to enter n which obscure part of Xcode to get the equipment I (my boss) paid for to do anything other than be dead weight. The flagship language (Swift) is half arsed. Some bits are OK, but the threading model is from the 1990s dressed in drag. Memory management by reference counting? Golly, how 1990s. Passing class parameters by reference as default, but not struct parameters - say what? Distributing the software we write to the users that need to use it is immensely painful, not my immediate problem, but I watch people in my firm tear their hair out trying to make it work. How the mighty have fallen.

throw2291 3y ago
[dead]
amomchilov 3y ago
Parameters of class type aren't passed by reference, either. Both instances of structs and instances of class are passed by value, except in the latter case the value being passed/copy is the reference. To pass by reference, you need `inout`.
- worik 3y ago
  No. Classes are passed by reference. I still have trauma