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Comment by gecko | Hacker News Reader

What have they done recently, though? Every last thing you listed is from the 90s. And if we're looking at the 90s, I can add to that list with things that actually stuck around: ColorSync, QuickTime, TrueType, AppleScript, and more all come from that decade. But while Apple has made innovative stuff on the UI front recently, I can't even name one damn thing they've done technically that I found that impressive other than the new JIT in Safari. Hell, I honestly think that what Microsoft's doing with .NET and Azure is more technically sophisticated and interesting than anything coming out of Apple--especially on the Cocoa/CocoaTouch/Objective-C front.

I think that's what's irritating Rentzsch so much, and to be honest, it really pisses me off, too. I don't mind if Apple doesn't want to be that innovative, but I take exception to being told that I'm not allowed to be innovative without their permission.

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well, off the top of my head: Grand Central, clang, C blocks, and OpenCL.

I was at WWDC last year, and I was surprised at how hardcore their compiler guys are. LLVM/Clang is some amazing stuff. And blocks have been in development since at least summer '08.

Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys", I'd say that Google has the advantage since e.g. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike have chosen to work there and not at Apple. They are on the team that's developing Go and the pace of improvement is pretty remarkable.

Rob Pike et al also developed Sawzall, a massively parallel data analysis language that's been in use in production at Google for several years.

Google also developed a custom register based Java VM for Android. And they have a Java to JavaScript (!) compiler for Google Web Toolkit.

Microsoft is doing more interesting work than Apple in developing production ready languages with e.g. Haskell (Simon Peyton-Jones is an MS researcher), .Net/C#, F#, IronPython. But unfortunately for MS they are tied to the albatross of Windows...

LLVM/Clang might look impressive but AFAIK not even Apple is using it to ship production code. Proof of concept implementations are one thing, production quality shipping code is another.

LLVM/Clang might look impressive but AFAIK not even Apple is using it to ship production code.

Now, see, thats just plain wrong. Apple ships some pretty big products that are built with clang/llvm: Xcode, OpenGL and OpenCL to name a few. And I wouldn't be surprised if parts of iPhone OS4 are built with it, due to [REDACTED due to the NDA].

Plus, you know, MacRuby. Which is built with LLVM and just as fascinating as IronPython is, in terms of integration with a preexisting environment (only the Cocoa/ObjC runtime instead of .NET runtime). And the few people working on that (some of which are Apple employees) are pretty damn smart as well.

Well, if you want to talk about "hardcore compiler guys"...

I'm also going to have to disagree with you on this. Chris Lattner and the rest of the people working on LLVM at Apple are pretty damned smart (and serious) about what they're working on. They might not have as large of a neckbeard as Ken Thompson does, but, that doesn't mean that they should be ignored outright.

Grand Central Dispatch and C blocks aren't technically interesting. Lots of languages have lambdas--the .NET framework has since, what, 2003? including via an incompatible extension to C++, which is almost exactly like C blocks to C?--and GCD, while fascinating for the Mac platform, isn't meaningfully different from thread pools on other platforms, such as Windows NT 4.

clang is interesting, and I will grant you OpenCL. So there are a couple. But very, very few.

GCD is more than a thread library.

It may not be "high CS" but it's a well-engineered solution that takes into account system-wide activity.

I.e., it's reflecting good engineering, not basic CS.

MacRuby

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