I know a couple of engineering teams at Apple that are working on new projects in Scala, while also maintaining some legacy systems. Some of these projects are quite critical to the company’s ecosystem, e.g. test systems. I’ve spoken with several engineers who helped create these systems years ago; they’re all now in senior management positions. Some still stand by the technology choices made back then, while others are more open when given a chance to reflect. The general consensus is that if Kotlin had been available at the time, or if Swift had been a viable option for back-end services, they definitely wouldn’t have chosen Scala for those projects.
Apple is a company, not an operating system. The parent is almost certainly aware macOS is BSD-based and is suggesting Apple also uses Linux in e.g. cloud deployments. They are of course correct.
The "higher" levels of XNU are largely inherited from the BSD legacy, but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base. So even if you take an inheritance angle, XNU is based on Mach, not BSD. macOS is full of BSD/derivatives code, sure, but it is not based on them. The foundation is laid elsewhere.
> No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion
The original assertion was: "Apple is BSD based". While we did move to assume Apple means macOS (iOS, et. al), we stayed the course with the remainder. There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?
Regardless, what you may have missed is the additional context the followed: "not Linux". The parallel to Linux in macOS is XNU. Therefore, if other systems are Linux-based as we are to infer from the original comment, then macOS is XNU-based, not BSD-based. Yes, XNU contains some BSD code, but it is not BSD. It is very much its own distinct kernel maintained independently of BSD-adjacent organizations.
> This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.
It could advance someone's understanding if they were open to seeing their understanding advance. I understand not everyone is accepting of new ideas and that many fear learning something new.
> There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?
A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD (and in bizarrely stubborn '90s-era design philosophy fashion, glued to Mach); some older stuff from NeXT came from earlier BSD codebases. I see 155 files in the ssh://git@github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu.gi repo that still have FreeBSD CVS version tags on them for some reason.
There is no curl code in the kernel. (If you want to be truly pedantic, and I see that you do, there is one shell script in that repo that assumes curl is installed.)
> A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD
Sure, just as we already discussed at the very beginning of our exchange. Glad you able to learn something from our discussion, even if it has taken you an astoundingly long to time to get there. Here I was starting to think you were one of those who reject learning. I am happy to learn that you're just slow.
> The general consensus is that if Kotlin had been available at the time, or if Swift had been a viable option for back-end services, they definitely wouldn’t have chosen Scala for those projects.
