Post by Omar Rizwan (@omar@social.omar.website)

neither macOS nor Linux feels much like "Unix" when you do non-1970s stuff (graphics, webcam, low-overhead profiling, introspection, some networking, IPC and weird MMU stuff, low-overhead polling/IO/subscriptions)

but Linux at least tries with /proc and /dev/videoX and new file descriptors like userfaultfd and pidfd and so on (and fork(2) still kinda works). macOS really makes no attempt to be Unix-like in comparison https://social.omar.website/@omar/statuses/01HWGZM1ACNS48HEQMFBCW0VAY

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Jack Rusher @jack@berlin.social

@omar I had to write a device driver for a USB device on MacOS awhile back, and all I could think of was how much easier it would have been if Plan9 had won…

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Joël Franusic @jpf@mastodon.social

@jack @omar hopefully it isn’t dead yet? I’m in the midst of writing my own 9P implementation with a goal of building a service to help others write their own more easily

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Gabriele Svelto @gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org

@omar since macOS uses mach under the hood it does all kind of horrors to emulate Unix features. Their fork() implementation is the thing nightmares are made of. And don't get me started on signals. Signals are wrapped into mach messages to be delivered, but some mach messages are also converted to signals by the kernel if you have a signal handler installed. Using native mach exception handling and signals is possible but nightmarish. I could go on for a while...

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