Well of course it is. OS X was a complete from-the-ground-up
rewrite.
There's code in OS 9 that was in System 1 on the original Mac128K.
And Windows is an application that sits on top of DOS. It's a shell.
That's
a simplification but there's much truth to it. Microsoft's next OS
supposedly finally does away with DOS as Apple did with System 1
when they
released OS X.
r
Ok, mythbustin time.
Numbah 1: Windows is a shell ontop of DOS
Bzzzzt. With the release of 95, Windows itself was it's own OS that
used DOS as a bootstrap. DOS would boot, touch off the Windows
loader, and was summarily ripped out. Windows would then load in it's
own drivers, irq handlers, etc, operating the machine fully. The neat
trick, it could put wrappers around DOS loaded drivers for some
devices to provide legacy access.
The Windos NT series has been a self hosting, microkernel core, full
OS from the start, no DOS involved. This includes 2k and XP. The NT
kernel is actually considered pretty damn good by those that sit
around comparing such things for a living. Its small, portable,
expandable, and pretty reliable. What hurts it is the crap code that
gets thrown ontop of it by third parties, drivers in particular. Some
of the drivers out there are complete crap...
Numbah 2: OS X is a completely new codebase written entirely from
scratch
Bzzzzt. OS X is a continuation of a long line of Mach + BSD OSs that
can trace it's src right back through Rhapsody clear back to NeXT.
This particular implimentation uses Mach with a userland sourced
primarily from FreeBSD, initially the 3.x tree, then 4.x with 10.1?
and now pulling from 5.x with Tiger. The majority of the underlying
services powering OS X are opensource software thats been around for
quite awhile. Printing is powered by CUPS for example.
Now, put down the torches, I'm not complaining that it's not a new OS.
I rather like the pedigree, it makes coming from full on UNIX boxen a
nice smooth transistion. I don't like what the OS does or won't do,
fine, pop open a shell, beat it into submission. Thats nice. It does
introduce problems though, such as the terrible threading perf. Apple
will slowly figure it out, but right now it hurts compared to similar
aged projects (NT) that have already gotten past these points in their
evolution.
Joshua Coombs
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