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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

> why this is significant?

Ultimately, because new people keep being born and missed the years where this was pretty common and haven't yet bumped into the corners where it still is.

The repo and the SO discussion it was inspired by are themselves 11 years old and seem to be rooted in a new generation of iOS app developers starting to get more deeply curious about the system they're running on and how else it might be approached, which this person then ran with on MacOS.

Apple invites people to get started in making software for their platforms using (what's meant to be) more accessible tooling like Objective-C, Interface Builder, Swift, SwiftUI, etc but there's of course a whole BSD-rooted operating system sitting there once those those developers start digging. It's no secret, but it's a discovery that some people need to make on their own.

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This isn’t an example of that. Have you looked at the code? This uses ObjC and Cocoa implementations in an unintuitive method. Nice exercise to learn about the ObjC runtime, but has zero practicality or use.

The funny thing is, Apple themselves seems to have forgotten about the whole BSD-rooted operating system. Anybody who ventures off the beaten path of developing software for a modern Mac will inevitably encounter a lot of cobwebs. One of my favorites: When Apple implemented app bundles, they never updated dyld's search paths to be aware of the app bundle directory structure, meaning you have to manually patch your rpaths. Not a huge deal, and one that's hidden from you if you only ever know xcode, but it's one of many very sloppy things I noticed coming from a strong Unix background to Mac. There's a lot of really weird incongruence where the deeper you go into the system, the more everything feels covered in dust and neglected. I was always sold on Macs having really great top-to-bottom integration and have all the polish and attention to detail you can expect out of a corporate Unix-like, but that's not what I found. It's more like a really shiny superstructure bolted on top of an ancient, rust-eaten BSD. Don't get me started on how a lot of the "newer" stuff at that low level tends to be some of the absolute worst takes on a concept. The "App Sandbox" might be the most disgusting, slap-dash design for process isolation I've ever seen bolted onto a kernel.

I get Apple's target market is quite literally the opposite kind of user that I am. That being said, I always find it curious that people still tout Mac as this kind of "Super Polished Desktop/Workstation Unix" and often cite the Unix certification. It feels like the more you try to use a Mac like you would any other Unix machine, the more you have to fight it. Often it doesn't feel any different to trying to wrangle Windows with WSL. I had less hiccups and trip-ups learning Plan 9 than I did coming to terms with macOS.

App bundles have no fixed layout. How would rpaths work if you didn’t specify them yourself?

They do if you want them to be signed.

> When Apple implemented app bundles, they never updated dyld's search paths to be aware of the app bundle directory structure, meaning you have to manually patch your rpaths.

Typically things like this have binary compatibility reasons. (It wouldn't be because they forgot, actually I happen to know the same person has worked on dyld since the 90s.)

> but it's one of many very sloppy things I noticed coming from a strong Unix background to Mac

Funny thing to complain about. Sloppiness /is/ Unix design, that's intentional. It's called "worse is better".

On the other hand, nobody uses Plan9 because it's too well-designed to actually work.

Oh wow, employed since NeXT? (There needs to be an "Apple/NeXT long-hauler oral history" or something. Chris Espinosa, hired 1976, is still around...)

Avie Tevanian and Jon Rubenstein both have oral histories on the Computer History Museum website/YouTube.

> Sloppiness /is/ Unix design, that's intentional. It's called "worse is better".

That's missing the point. It's about simplicity through well designed abstraction. Unix was a runaway game engine that became Bell Lab's standard for talking to computers because it was vastly simpler than the poorly engineered MULTICS and friends. That's why it won.

> On the other hand, nobody uses Plan9

I use Plan 9 every day. I'm replying to you from inside abaco. I run a tablet with it, have a whole network of machines (most of them virtual). I'm in the middle of a project to create a light fixture I can talk to in 9p. It's not the first DIY IoT thing I've made to control over a Plan 9 terminal. My grid also runs my email, my file servers, an LLM chatbot (though this is actually served from a Linux machine via Inferno tsk tsk.) The only reason I use anything else is due to my job requiring me to ship a product in C++ and OpenGL. For something that doesn't "actually work", I find that it actually works excellently.

Hyperbole; "nobody" means an insignificant amount of people.

Go programmers use something Plan9-y, but I don't think much of Go's design either; it's a combination of Unix's underdesign with Plan9's inflexible and idiosyncratic taste.

> I always find it curious that people still tout Mac as this kind of "Super Polished Desktop/Workstation Unix" and often cite the Unix certification

I've always understood people to mean that it's a polished desktop operating system (though that's becoming increasingly questionable these days) that also happens to run the same CLI stuff they're used to using on Linux servers.

Pre-WSL just that was a pretty nice selling point by itself.

Nah, this was already like this at NeXT.

The whole UNIX infrastructure was to get into the DoJ stuff that required POSIX compliance.

Just like with Microsoft, the approach was to allow UNIX software to come into NeXTSTEP, not to be created in NeXTSTEP and then leave it for other UNIX vendors.

All the relevant programs in NeXTSTEP used Objective-C, and even the drivers were written in Objective-C.

Apple was clever marketing OS X to the Desktop Linux crowd, that actually only cared about a POSIX experience and not so much about Linux itself.

Many of them helped Apple get out of red, into the company it is today.

This is how Microsoft finally understood how bad they did with POSIX on Windows NT linage, and out of Project Astoria ashes, WSL was born.

Had Microsoft actually kept POSIX subsystem up to date, and in parity with Win32 subsystem, and most likely Linux would never taken off, as everyone would have had their proper POSIX right there, without needing to look elsewhere.

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