tbh linux has quite a bit of cruft in it these days at the syscall and interface layer.

if youre apple, it does make sense to do stuff from scratch. i think in a way, software guys wind up building their own prisons. an api is created to solve problem X given world Y, but world Y+1 has a different set of problems - problems that may no longer be adequately addressed given the api invented for X.

people talk about "rewrite everything in rust" - I say, why stop there? lets go down to the metal. make every byte, every instruction, every syscall a commodity. imagine if we could go all the way back to bare metal programming, simply by virtue of the LLM auto-coding the bootloader, scheduler, process manager, all in-situ.

the software world is full of circularities like that. we went from Mainframe -> local -> mainframe, why not baremetal -> hosted -> baremetal?

▲

xantronix 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Apple doesn't do a lot of baremetal development from scratch that I'm aware of. The Lightning to HDMI dongle bootstraps an XNU kernel with an AirPlay decoder into 256MB RAM, for instance.

	▲	toast0 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Doesn't Apple pretty much own their whole stack? You mentioned XNU, which they made... Their CPU, their boards, their firmware (presumably), their OS[1], much of the perhipherals are theirs, too. Lots of companies try to emulate Apple, but it's very hard to pull off. [1] Yes, they use some parts from Mach and FreeBSD in their OS, but the amalgamation is theirs, and they support and change the whole thing as needed.
	▲	pjmlp 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Boot loader firmware, initially done in a Safe C dialect, nowadays one of the reasons Embedded Swift came to be.

▲

trollied 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You can still do “unsafe” stuff in rust, and people do. It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. And you don’t have to deal with a borrow checker, and a very small pool of developers available to hire.

▲

AceJohnny2 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days.

It's also very hard to do so.

	▲	lyu07282 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		The chrome team doesn't manage that, but perhaps they are just bad at C++ /s

▲

webdevver 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

oh, i didnt mean to invoke rust in any technical sense - i brought up rust to introduce an example of the attitude that rust people are known for, namely "why not rewrite everything?", which a lot of people have a kneejerk rejection of.