[nicolaus]

I recall this missive from Linus Torvalds on the design of Linux:

"If you want to see a system that was more thoroughly _designed_, you should probably point not to Dennis and Ken, but to systems like L4 and Plan-9, and people like Jochen Liedtk and Rob Pike. And notice how they aren't all that popular or well known? "Design" is like a religion - too much of it makes you inflexibly and unpopular."

http://kerneltrap.org/node/11

[uriel]

That is a somewhat silly comment from Linus given that ken and rob designed and built Plan 9 together. (For example, ken designed UTF-8 while rob helped write the code: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history )

[yxhuvud]

Yes, like Apple.

.. oh wait.

It is rather that good design make you popular and not so good design doesn't.

[william42]

Apple's internal design was a mess pre-OSX though. Still kind of is. Apple's praised for end-user interface design.

[uriel]

OS X design is still a horrible mess, a monolithic BSD kernel bolted on top of a monstruous Mach 'micro'-kernel. Not to mention things like the new XML-based init system, property list files, hacks around 'extended attributes' (or whatever they call them) and many other aberrations.

[dextorious]

And those are a mess because?

Property list files: a big f*n win compared to the ad hoc mess in a Linux/BSD /etc directory.

Hacks around extended attributes: any reason not to like those? Or just because in 1977 a file was just a file, and that's the way it should be, god damn it?

XML-based init system: a sane init system. And XML added in for standardization.

OS X is a mess in several ways, but those are not it. And the "monolithic BSD kernel bolted on top of a Mach 'micro'-kernel" sounds like a win-win situation. Monstrous why? Because it doesn't fit some idealistic model?

[FooBarWidget]

Even standard system calls are messily implemented. poll() is broken. kqueue is broken. See http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AN...

Last year I even discovered a kernel bug in their file descriptor passing implementation that, AFAIK, still isn't fixed. Various signal handling properties are more buggy than on Linux.

[udp]

TCP_NOPUSH is broken, too - if you enable it and then later disable it with setsockopt, it doesn't immediately send any pending data (as it does on FreeBSD, and as TCP_CORK does on Linux).

IIRC, a lot of their code came from FreeBSD back in the day. I wonder why they didn't keep it in sync?

[enneff]

It's a mess because there are several ways to do the same things, and no two things are done in the same way. It feels like any time I want to do something new in OS X I need to learn a new system of some kind. That is bad design. It should just be obvious.

[exogen]

If "obviousness" is the criteria for a well-designed OS, I'm not sure we've seen a (successful) well-designed OS in the history of computing. OS X certainly doesn't deserve to be called out. :)

[yxhuvud]

So is Unix.

It is just that the end users are different people to the ones on Mac (and would indeed usually be power users or developers there).