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Comment by boris | Hacker News Reader

> I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent whole [...]

The closest I got to experience inner workings of NeXT software is observing the boot log of Mac OS (which you can see if you boot it with Qemu/Clover). I haven't seen so many triple exclamation marks in a while. That somehow didn't leave the impression of carefully and intentionally designed software.

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I couldn't say how similar a 2020 MacOS bootlog is at this point to anything that was in NeXT, and wouldn't assume that whatever you're seeing now that you find inelegant was there in NeXTStep 20 years ago or longer. I mean, maybe, but I wouldn't just assume it and judge NeXT for it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In any event, the boot log is not something I had occasion to pay attention to in NeXTStep, I couldn't speak to it.

NeXTStep/OpenStep had a great development environment and was full of innovation but even in the '90s it had old BSD components that were rarely updated and it really wasn't a great unix. Mac OS X has followed that pattern. Also Mach was inherently slow so running OpenStep on x86 hardware was slower than Linux or Windows - in Mac OS X they finally gave up on a pure microkernel and flattened the kernel to reduce the overhead of message passing through the BSD personality layer to Mach. But folks running OpenStep were running it for the RAD development tools and EOF that let you quickly design a UI with a very usable ORM that allowed you to take a desktop app and turn it into a webapp via WebObjects seamlessly. They complained about the *nix layer even then, but the unix layer was adequate and you could compile newer versions of tools you needed then as now.

After Apple bought NeXT, they upgraded the Mach component from 2.5 to 3.0 (from Apple’s MkLinux project). But it was always a hybrid kernel in both NEXTSTEP and macOS.

“Mac OS” pre-“X” (9.x and prior) or “macOS” post-“X” (11.x and newer)?

They obviously don't mean pre-x as that would have no bearing on NeXT. Probably just collqually using the current name to mean mac os(x) >= 10.0

Ah yes. That makes sense. And the rep hit I got shows what happens if you comment when you just woke up

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