• their ObjC WebObjects-based web backends (such as the iTunes Music Store backend — which might still be ObjC-based to this day? Anyone know?) ran on NetBSD servers

• the firmware in Airport routers was NetBSD

I wouldn't be surprised if there’s an Apple Silicon build of NetBSD, created for internal use at Apple. (Though I also wouldn't be surprised, if they've tried to "converge efforts" since then, and have somehow stuck a Darwin userland on top of a NetBSD kernel.)

I would be genuinely surprised, though, if the infra folk at Apple trust the XNU kernel's network stack enough at this point to want to use plain XNU/Darwin for their servers!

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As an aside, I've always been fascinated by Apple's approach to backend/server technologies, compared to other bigcorps. Despite not being a "UNIX shop" per se, Apple seems to have acquired some engineers somewhere along the way who have a deep understanding of the "UNIX way" to build stuff, and who carry what might even be called "legacy ideas" about system architecture.

You can get a peek into this approach, by prying into the insides of the old Server.app. Sort of like how XCode.app has a BSD buildroot inside it, with the base OS shipping with stub binaries that call inside it when it's available; Server.app does the same, but with an extended BSD userland containing regular old BSD daemons.

Besides being a wrapper for this BSD-userland payload, Server.app itself was just a configuration wizard and state-converger for a set of plain-old config files, living in a virtual /etc dir (regenerated from canonial plist files), that enabled and drove these venerable daemons to do their thing. The "Websites" feature was just Apache, and the "Wiki", "Calendar/Contacts", etc features were just symlink-managed PHP-FCGI plugins for that Apache instance. The DNS was just BIND. The VPN feature was mostly racoond[1]. It's exactly what you'd expect from e.g. cPanel on Linux, with no sense of anything "Apple-y" going on.

[1] https://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/ipsec/rasvpn.html

This UNIX-y approach also seemingly extends to Apple's use of networking protocols. Even while Apple was giving users a proprietary SMB-alike protocol (AFP) to use for local-network file sharing, their internal approach was different: macOS, to this day, ships with a pre-configured "auto-home" mobile user profile feature, that expects to talk not to an AFP server, or even an SMB server, but rather to an NFS(!!) server. (You could even set this up for yourself, in the Server.app days, given sufficient understanding of Apple's OpenDirectory + how it integrates with BSD Kerberos.)