Re: SimCAS work for anybody? Whither Rhapsody?

[Miles Parker]

>>> Benedikt Stefansson <address@hidden> - 5/12/98 8:04 AM >>>
>I also noted a significant difference in performance between Swarm and this 
>SimCAS, especially GUI operations seem to carry a large overhead  - clicking 
>on a probe etc. slows the system noticeably, which doesn't seem to be the case 
>in Swarm.

This is true on the Mac especially, since the Mac VMs are just painfully slow. 
I actually got reasonable performance using Symantec's JIT 3.0 on an NT box; 
haven't done a direct comparison vs. Swarm on that machine yet. I also have not 
yet run it as a native executable.

>You are not the only one interpreting the keynote in this manner, but note 
>that Apple states explicitly that Rhapsody is their server, internet and 
>publishing platform and that MacOS X will be Mach kernel based, containing 
>technologies from Rhapsody and MacOS.
 
Yea, I was going to post a follow-up on this after my initial impression had a 
chance to be temperred a bit. It does seem that Apple's present strategy is the 
only rational one, given the obvious "reluctance" of developers to port all of 
their apps to the Yellow Box APIs. I guess I was just surprised to see how 
completly the Yellow Box APIs were deemphasized. (Actually, I don't think Jobs 
even mentioned them in the keynote, but my connection kept breaking.) There 
seems to have been a sharp lowering of expectations at Apple of how well the 
Rhapsody solution is really going to fare against established solutons (Unix, 
NT), but time will tell.

My selfish interest is to have some kind of native, cross-platform, broadly 
adopted, relatively modern api that I can write to. Yellow Box seemed (seems?) 
to be a good candidate. Perhaps Java will get to the point where it can fill 
this role.

-Miles

Miles Parker       The Brookings Institution
mailto:address@hidden  phone: 202.797.6136



                  =================================   Swarm-Support is for 
discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.
                  ================================