This is why I went with GNUstep. All of the APIs are 1:1 with Apple's, including the runtime (which is very important imo). It has AppKit support as well; its AppKit implementation is kind of half-baked, but at least it exists. Also, a lot of the APIs are kind of old. But looking at how Swift evolved over the years, maybe that's not a bad thing.
My main complaint with GNUstep is the licensing. The runtime itself is MIT which is great, but its implementation of Foundation/AppKit is LGPL. ObjFW, including its runtime, is LGPL. At least with GNUstep one day I can create my own version of Foundation based on Cocotron or swift-corelibs-foundation or something, and not need to muck with rpaths + ship a bunch of .dll/.dylib/.so files with my app in order to comply with the license.
I read this comment, about to snap back with an anecdote how I as a 13 year old was able to learn Lua quite easily, and then I stopped myself because that wasn't productive, then pondered what antirez might think of this comment, and then I realized that antirez wrote it.
I think the older you are the harder Lua is to learn. GP didn't say it made wrong choices, just choices that are gratuitously different from other languages in the Algol family.
I’m tickled that one of my favorite developers is commenting on another of my favorites work. Would be great if Nicolas Cannasse were also in this thread!
Srs question, I keep reading everywhere from experienced people Wayland sucks. I need to start learning of these stacks, should I go with Wayland or should I go with Xorg?
If I didn't know any better I would learn the Wayland API. Just like how: if I didn't know any better I would learn Swift (instead of Objective-C). But thankfully I do know better and I know to stay far away from Swift [1]. Is it the same deal with Xorg/Wayland? It seems like noobs prefer Wayland but the experts prefer Xorg.
I guess it provides less freedom/flexibility on the dev side. You're forced to use LuaJIT, and you're forced to buy into OpenResty's coroutine paradigm where global variables act weird, and stuff like that. Also I bet it doesn't play super nice with LuaRocks.
Totally valid choice to make, but in my opinion OP is missing out. OpenResty is state of the art and has a ton of great libraries embedded in it. It's "batteries included" so to speak, and the batteries are well designed. Yichun Zhang is one of the GOATs, along with Mike Pall. And Roberto, obviously.
While everything you said there is true, it is a matter of taste for me. I prefer working with PUC Lua over LuaJIT. The speed improvement of LuaJIT doesn't matter for me, the only thing I miss from it is the FFI. I wish PUC Lua had the same FFI interface tbh.
On the topic of ditching Docker, has anyone else created a custom test harness with QEMU? I feel like I'm the only person doing it this way. QEMU's target userbase is emulators in general, which is a much broader audience with way more development effort going into it, therefore I don't think it can ever go "out of fashion" or get hijacked by perverse corporate interests like Docker can. Podman seems to have the same vulnerability.
Interesting, thanks. Looks much better than Docker/Podman. But seems to suffer from the same incentive issue. I think I'll stick with my raw QEMU setup, Lima seems like QEMU + batteries, but I already built the batteries.
Yeah, seems like the power law is at play here. I made my test harness in 2020 so I didn't have a choice as Lima didn't exist back then. I should have waited a year. I'll certainly keep an eye on it
When Cook became CEO, all of this was inevitable. I used to blame Jobs for not picking Forstall as his successor, but it recently dawned on me that it was never his choice to begin with. The board probably crowded him out again, just like the Sculley situation.
In a month Apple will have been on autopilot for longer than Jobs was at the company during the 1997-2011 heyday. Jobs became iCEO in September 1997. After 167 months passed, he left in August 2011. It has been 166 months since then.
Cant believe Tim Cook is about to be CEO longer than Steve Jobs. Thank You for that perspective.
On the other hand Steve Jobs has accomplished far more within the same time frame compared to Tim Cook with far fewer resources. I really like the analogy of "autopilot".
I do think Steve could push Forstall as his successor, but didn't because Forstall wasn't ready as CEO. Tim Cook was a much better choice at the time as they have to compete with Android and they need market share ( in terms of user not sales ) to not repeat the same mistake with Mac vs PC. Tim should have mediate between Forstall and Ive instead of picking sides. The restructuring created power vacuum for Craig and Eddy Cue to pick up. With Crag we end up with OS that is constantly resume / features release driven and Eddy Cue which we end up with Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade. None of them in my opinion are good decisions or great products / services.
Accomplish more is relative. At a large, later stage, companies become a lot more stability and long term revenue & sustainability. Which Tim Cook has absolutely excelled at. Sure, Steve was more of a tech revolutionary. But weird designs were super common under him! The Apple design language has been pretty consistent over the past decade.
I think it’s odd this thread is largely complaining about Apple taking too many risks, or making weird designs they don’t like, or being too feature-driven. The fact of the matter is that Apple has by far created the most stable tech ecosystem of any comparable company. With a very consistent design language as well.
Windows has a horrific track record (with only Windows 7 & 10 being well regarded in the past 15+ years). Android typically doesn’t support devices with major software updates past a small handful of years. Apple’s combo of privacy, long term support, and extremely consistent release cadences & design language make it a much more stable platform than practically anything else. They even did an entire hardware architecture change under our feet without downgrading the user experience in any meaningful way.
I mean whether or not you agree or like Apple’s service products like Apple Music, it is absolutely a very smart business decision to continue investing in them. Apple TV has a higher percentage of high quality content than other providers. Apple Music is at worst hardly that different than Spotify. Apple Arcade is just a way to bundle products that already exist.
>it is absolutely a very smart business decision to continue investing in them
I dont disagree. In fact I talked about services revenue in 2012 / 2013 before it was even a term on Appleinsider and other places. But the difference is that old Apple make a Great product and then make a business case out of it.
New Apple is we need to grow services so what should we do, and make some product out of it to fill the gap.
One is a Product focus another is a business revenue focus. Very different mind set. Although arguably both would have worked well if a Yard Stick of Quality was in place. Which is lacking in many areas in modern Apple.
>Which Tim Cook has absolutely excelled at.
That is somewhat true. Best operational manager and supply chain before anyone on the internet knew of it. But on taking risk it is going in all the wrong places. Apple had 200 Stores world wide before the 1.2 Billion iPhones and 2 Billions I Devices user. And they had 50 planned so arguably they had 250. Now they have ~500 Stores. The moment you have somehow who thinks Apple Store is a cost centre and not somewhere to quote SJ "Help your customers".
Apple TV+ having little to zero impact outside of US. And even in US home turf they are not doing great. But burning 5 to 10 billion every single year just to hide your services revenue profit margin.
I guess I could sum it up as Apple has more money than they know what to do with it. And Tim Cook is being stringent in places it shouldn't and spending on things that till now provide little value.
I suspect ego played a part in Steve Jobs selecting Tim Cook as his successor. Famous CEO's tend to pick a successor that is less charismatic and more risk-averse than they were. CEO's that retire 'honorably', so to speak, don't want someone who will outshine them or make sweeping changes to the brand or the company's organization. In other words, they want to preserve their legacy.
Tim Cook is exactly this kind of executive. While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple, the public doesn't give credit for that sort of thing. Now imagine if Steve appointed someone just like himself and the business fumbled. Steve would hate for his legacy to be tarnished by appointing a brash successor.
All that being said, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone could have lived up to Steve's reputation. It is quite unfair to Tim Cook that he will always be compared to what people think Steve Jobs would have done.
IDK, I think Apple creating its own laptop/desktop-class CPU was a pretty bold move with a huge payoff. It's less sexy than introducing an entirely new category of product, but it's not exactly risk-averse either.
> While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple
Can we say that yet? A lot of value was made in the short term, but it kinda feels like that would happen to any CEO that has an iPhone moment on their hands. Cook's real challenge was to flip the scenario into something sustainable; can Apple take the excitement and turn it into a product line?
They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience. Airpods took off, presumably after Cook learned from the failure (and acquisition) of Beats by Dre. And Vision Pro... the less said the better. Maybe there's something still in the holster, but I expect this to be a dead-end product line moreso than Airpower.
Are disposable headphones enough to build a legacy off of? The Apple Watch certainly isn't, and don't even get me started on Vision Pro. We could point to the big one that everyone likes to credit him as; "the supply chain guy", but even that seems to foster political contention in America. Apple's software faces antitrust scrutiny, privacy concerns[0], and an overall degradation in app quality as their attention splits into different markets. The legacy is the important question, and if Tim Cook were to resign tomorrow I think he would be remembered as the CEO that screwed Apple over for good.
> They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience.
That's an interesting way to say "is the best selling watch model of all time, and outsells not only all other smartwatches combined but also a substantial chunk of all normal watches put together."
Steve knew he'd dead by the time the next CEO's results were in. Do you really think he'd prefer Apple to stagnate rather than continue to soar with a great CEO after his dead?
Literally everything I've ever read about Forstall and his behavior post-Jobs makes me think he would have been an awful CEO. It just sounded like he was "Game of Thrones-ing" from the second Cook became CEO. E.g. it was widely reported that Ive and Forstall could barely stand to be in the same meeting with each other. I may have some criticisms in my mind about some of Ive's design post-Jobs, but I don't think I have ever heard other folks be critical of Ive's leadership style or personality - everything I've read about him uses words like "inspirational", "remarkable", "calm", etc. I've read tons of criticism about Forstall.
Nothing new probably - I just remember diving down the rabbit hole from the Wikipedia page on Forstall a couple years back, e.g. stuff like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20514464.
But more importantly, I take issue with the main theme of your first link, as it's stuff I've heard a bunch elsewhere. I can agree that "innovation requires some tension", but I think it's a huge mistake to think that because Forstall had some (or at least looked like he had some) of the qualities of Jobs that he was the right man for the <no pun intended> job. I.e the argument usually goes something like "Hey, Jobs was disagreeable and kind of an asshole, so since Forstall is disagreeable and even more of an asshole he should be CEO."
But that clearly misses the fact that Forstall could in no way engender the level of respect that Jobs had, and I don't think people would have respected him more if he became CEO. People really admired Jobs at a deep, deep level, and that was clearly not the case for Forstall based on the many other Apple execs who couldn't stand him.
Man, if Apple 2011-2025 is "on autopilot" I wish I was on autopilot like that. Can you give me a company that wasn't? I'm curious what your bar is exactly.
Jobs pick him because he knew he's gonna to handle company's financials good once he's gone. My partner says Cook is just a good accountant focused on keeping numbers up and nothing else.
Yep, same deal with AsyncDisplayKit and the classic "iOS can't handle our scale". Too many cooks. Move along, this isn't the library you're looking for
My main complaint with GNUstep is the licensing. The runtime itself is MIT which is great, but its implementation of Foundation/AppKit is LGPL. ObjFW, including its runtime, is LGPL. At least with GNUstep one day I can create my own version of Foundation based on Cocotron or swift-corelibs-foundation or something, and not need to muck with rpaths + ship a bunch of .dll/.dylib/.so files with my app in order to comply with the license.
reply