Darwin Voyage (Part I): Interview with Andrew Stone
Some more buying ahead?.

March 9th, 2.000

 

This interview is (hopefully) the first of a series in which we will attempt to delve a bit into the people and the facts behind the Darwin project. We have set out to find those who can answer the questions we all have concerning Mac OS X's Open Source sibling... and we are also trying to throw some light on the Mac OS X development scene, one of those areas that we know too little about... apart from the fact that they're full of promise :-).

The first Darwin project member to answer our call was Andrew Stone, of Stone Design. His firm comes from the NeXTSTEP world with a complete set of Mac OS X-ready applications that should be far better known by now... since in six month's time they will be among the first Cocoa-native applications available for the Mac OS X, and will be giving Mac OS 9 incumbents a run for their money.
 

Q: You're working with Apple as a Darwin developer since December 13th, 1.999. How is Darwin going?

A: Darwin is just now starting to take off. Much of OS X is based on Darwin, and we expect 1.0 to ship real soon.
Developer interest has been great, including a port of the X windows system by John Carmack of id software.

Q: How did it all beguin?

A: The amazing tale of Darwin is that it all started because Fred Sanchez was put in charge, single-handedly, of the entire FreeBSD layer of Mac OS X.

He had the foresight to realize that what makes Open Software so compelling and dynamic is the fact that many developers from all around the world can contribute to the stability and feature set of the software. He convinced Ernest Prabhakar, then in charge of Rhapsody Marketing, that this was a good idea. So both of these men deserve credit for making Darwin happen.

Q: What are the most interesting features of the work method of the Darwin project?

A: The development environment of Darwin is setup to let programmers from around the world makecontributions to a single source tree with CVS, thus maintaining the whole of Darwin in synch.

Q:  Can you tell us what are the most interesting recent or expected developments, and what is itlikely to mean for Mac OS X? And, can you see any implications and comparisons with the Linux movement?

A: Enhancements made to Darwin will get rolled into Mac OS X - so this is a way where any developer can implement new features or provide bug fixes.

FreeBSD has the ability to run LINUX binaries, so we'll be able to take advantage of applications ported to LINUX.

As far as which kernel is better, the CMU Mach kernel 3.0 or Linus's? That's always a matter of lengthy debate!

Q: In your case I'd also like to ask about the Mac OS X software scene. You can plug away your software here if you like. Please do :-), we're most interested in hearing about the new software generation.

A: Because OS X is based on FreeBSD and Cocoa is based on OpenStep, Stone Design was able to quickly port our applications to Developer Preview 3. Mac Users are going to be thrilled with the new Aqua Interface!

Applications which are based on Cocoa (formerly known as Yellow Box, OpenStep or NeXTSTEP) take full advantage of the Altivec through Quartz.

Andrew got down to answer our first set of questions just as soon as he received them. We're inmensely grateful and hope his good example will be an inspiration to all :-), but we'll be back for more. He just knows so much of things we want to learn about :-).
 

 

 

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