On Jun 28, 2005, at 2:24 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
That 'crud', as you put it, is why people use OS X over, say,
Windows or Linux. And, truth be told, it's no more piggy than
Windows or XWindows.
Oh, I know. But comparing one pig with another does not a fast cat
make. Nor does it excuse either company for using inefficient
designs and producing bad code. OTOH, we need to do our share to
keep the workers employeed.
There's also the point that while higher code efficiency can be
gotten, it's at the cost of portability, readability and/or
maintainability. Always keep in mind that old, old engineering
paradigm: "Faster, Better, Cheaper. Pick any two."
Yes, the original Mac OS did some astonishing things in a very tight
hardware envelope.
If Andy Hertzfeld had been hit by a bus in 1982, the Mac would have
died in infancy, too...AND he needed a VAX to do it all.
You simply cannot have handrolled hand-optimized assembler driving
your GUI these days, and OS X is one complex beast.
It's not 'bad code'. Try writing some of your own before you
criticize theirs. I know I stopped having such delusions of grandeur
the first time I tried writing some 6502 assembler to mix in with my
Applesoft BASIC. I saw no reason I couldn't do "windows" on an Apple
II: in theory, it's easy. The pseudocode just rolled right out.
Then came *implementing* the pseudocode...=8-0
Apple's Java in OS X is a straight recompile/port of Java; it's no
more or less inefficient than Java on any other officially
supported platform.
johnson$ java -version
java version "1.4.2_07"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_07-215)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-50, mixed mode)
Interesting. I didn't know that!
OS X has bog-standard Java. Java runs better on an OS X box, in
general, than it does on most other platforms, so I really doubt the
complaints are about 'poor Java implementation', but 'poor Java coding'.
So the 'guys running Xserves' bitching about Java are probably
bitching about Apple's Java *apps* not Java, since all of the GUI
admin tools on XServes are Java apps (which is why you can admin
an XServe system equally well from a Mac, Windows or Linux box...)
I will check/get details. I think they're bitching about the
transaction speed of several server packages. I know they're
referring to comparitive benchmarks using OS X, FreeBSD, Linux,
and ?Win 2003? Server.
I'd need to know what they're talking about before I could hazard a
guess, but from my experience, it's apparently quite easy to write
horridly inefficient code in java.
There are some artificial benchmarks going around that purport to
show how this package or that package runs really slow on
Xserves..MySQL comes to mind; IIRC I read a thorough dissection of
the issue on Slashdot a while back where a number of people pointed
out how the benchmarks had been deliberately skewed in favor of one
platform.
All that said, I've not done more than play with an Xserve on
occasion, so I'm hardly an expert, but OS X and OS X Server aren't
all that different...all that differentiates them are the Admin
utilities and some default configurations that come with the system.
The Unix sides are identical and that's where all the server
processes reside.
--
Bruce Johnson
This is the sig who says 'Ni!'
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