Monday June 06, 2005 MacOS X on Solaris ?
Our COO invited Apple to adopt Solaris as the base of MacOS X. For those of you who don't remember or know the history behind this, this isn't the first time there's such a proposal. See our own Rich B's blog here for a bit of history. In fact, OpenSTEP implementation was working (including Mail.app albeit with fonts rendered ugly compared to native NeXTSTEP). FYI, our COO used to work for a company called Lighthouse Design which used to produce softwares for NeXTSTEP.
I used to run NeXTSTEP 3.3j on my SPARCstation, as well as the earlier versions of OpenSTEP on Solaris. All NeXTSTEP GUI applications were great - it indeed was 10 years ahead of everything. However, mach kernel and BSD server in NeXTSTEP was...at best flaky and slow and it was clearly behind Solaris at the time. I think it will take years for darwin to catch up with Solaris 10 - evidence ? OS X has very recently added 64bit support or fine grained locking/reentrant kernel and it's been years since Solaris had those. And it will take even more time for Apple to catch up with all those new features in Solaris 10 - Dtrace, Zones, ZFS, FMA and etc. IMHO, it would make perfect sense for Apple to switch to Solaris 10 on x86 replacing Darwin. Here's hoping that Apple will consider switching to Solaris :)
PS. I know. It's even less likely than Apple's switch to Intel. But surely one can have a dream. ( Jun 06 2005, 10:33:44 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]