Comment by wmf
14 years ago
Rhapsody ran on x86 and PowerPC in 1998. This story says that by 2000 OS X no longer ran on x86 and required 18 person-months of effort to get it working again. That's a lot of bitrot.
14 years ago
Rhapsody ran on x86 and PowerPC in 1998. This story says that by 2000 OS X no longer ran on x86 and required 18 person-months of effort to get it working again. That's a lot of bitrot.
I could believe it.
The period from 1996 to 2000 had many many hundreds of Mac OS programmers rewriting and adapting existing technologies over, much of it C++ not ObjC -- classic apis (aka Carbon), Quicktime, Sound Manager, Quartz, font management, speech, probably lots more I can't think of.
So that's hundreds of programmers over two years or more. And to introduce C++ compatibility into shedloads of new code takes a single person half the time? Probably while simultaneously teaching himself about the intricacies of a new hardware platform and hundreds of big libraries he's probably never coded for before?
I think it sounds impressive.
I had the impression that NeXT had very high coding standards[1] including endian-neutrality and processor portability; I guess that went by the wayside during OS X development.
[1] Perhaps too high, considering the failure of original NeXT.
What was Apple supposed to do, fire all of their existing PPC C++ programmers and hire a whole new team? No, they utilised their existing resources very effectively to finish the Mac OS X project in surprisingly short time. Apple made the smartest possible move considering commercial realities.