Re: Future of Cocoa
Re: Future of Cocoa
- Subject: Re: Future of Cocoa
- From: Jens Alfke via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 15:38:09 -0800
> On Nov 21, 2019, at 2:43 PM, Pascal Bourguignon via Cocoa-dev
> <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> Why couldn’t we have application developed once for a few users, and working
> consistently over long periods, on a stable platform?
Stable platforms don't make money. (Except maybe in the enterprise market where
vendors sell support contracts for e.g. CentOS.)
> Currently the only solution would be to package such application in frozen
> hardware and system software, which is not practical (users would need
> different computers for each application!), and feasible (computers are not
> really buillt to last more than a few year of usage).
Macs last quite a while. I have friends who still use ten-year-old MacBook Pros.
> Actually, things have changed. On Macintosh, basically an application
> developed in 1984 against the Inside Macintosh (1.0) specifications still
> worked in 1999 in the blue box with MacOS 9.1.
Wellll … _some_ applications still worked. Most would crash, or even bomb the
OS, or misbehave; because they weren't 32-bit clean, or wrote directly to
screen memory, or made assumptions about internal data structures, or etc. etc.
etc. Even those that worked would show a black-and-white UI, often in a
non-resizable 512x350 pixel window.
This level of backward compatibility was one of the things that crippled and
almost killed Apple in the '90s. (I know, I was there.) It was nearly
impossible to move the OS forward because any sort of modernization — like
memory protection or multithreading — would break tons of apps. That's why
"Rhapsody" failed.
—Jens
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