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[Chicken-users] Re: MacOS X is its' own beast


From: Thomas Christian Chust
Subject: [Chicken-users] Re: MacOS X is its' own beast
Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 09:55:40 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070221 SeaMonkey/1.1.1

Kon Lovett wrote:

> [...]
> There is POSIX support via the CRT library. A compatibility attempt.
> [...]

Hello Kon,

as far as I know, the only thing similar to POSIX in the Win32 CRT
library is file descriptor emulation. And that's almost entirely useless
because it supports none of the more advanced operations like poll /
select. Plus the file descriptors from the CRT library are of course
incompatible with those used by the socket library. I plainly refuse to
recognize this half-baked mess even as an attempt at compatibility ;-)

> [...]
> See "MacOS X Internals". A "... native API for userspace to communicate
> with the kernel is POSIX compliant ..." not the native API. Yes, it is a
> UNIX, BSD flavor. Makes porting a straight-forward operation. But a
> native MacOS X app is not a UNIX app.
> [...]

Well, if you only consider the Mach kernel interfaces native, then you
are right. But I would consider the Mach interfaces internal API and
only the BSD, Carbon and Cocoa interfaces public API, because it would
be pretty tedious to write anything useful using only the Mach
interfaces and because otherwise I also would have to claim that Carbon
and Cocoa are not native APIs on MacOS X but rather compatibility layers
for MacOS <=9 and OpenStep just like the BSD subsystem is a
compatibility layer for other UNIX flavors. Additionally nearly any
complex MacOS X application uses a fair amount of both Cocoa or Carbon
and BSD API calls -- for example most network code cannot be implemented
in pure Cocoa or Carbon, but very few applications ever access the Mach
interfaces directly.

So I guess it's all a question of your point of view...

cu,
Thomas





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