> Apple does stuff like this so much and gets so little flak for it.
Why should they get flak for having internal APIs? The fact that the internal API is a superset of the external API is smart engineering.
Think about it this way: Apple could just as well have made the "Metal that Apple uses themselves" some arcane "foocode" IR language or something, as I'm sure many shader compilers and OpenGL runtime implementations do, and nobody would be nearly as mad about it.
The fact that they use internal APIs for external apps in their weird iOS walled garden is obnoxious, but having private, undocumented APIs in a closed-source driver is not exactly an Apple anomaly.
> Why should they get flak for having internal APIs? The fact that the internal API is a superset of the external API is smart engineering.
It's not about having good segmentation of user-facing and kernel-side libraries, no one faults them for that.
It's about Apple building user-facing apps that use the whole API, and then demanding that other developers not use the features required to implement those apps because we're not trusted to maintain the look-and-feel, responsiveness, or battery life expectations of apps on the platform.
But isn't it kind of fair to say that when you look at the case studies presented by (a) the Android app store in the past decade and (b) Windows malware in the decade before that, this trust has in fact not been earned?
I hate a walled garden as much as the next developer, and the median HN reader is probably more than trustworthy. But past performance does predict future performance.
Why should they get flak for having internal APIs? The fact that the internal API is a superset of the external API is smart engineering.
Think about it this way: Apple could just as well have made the "Metal that Apple uses themselves" some arcane "foocode" IR language or something, as I'm sure many shader compilers and OpenGL runtime implementations do, and nobody would be nearly as mad about it.
The fact that they use internal APIs for external apps in their weird iOS walled garden is obnoxious, but having private, undocumented APIs in a closed-source driver is not exactly an Apple anomaly.