>Selection, yes. Natural? Do you somehow imply that technology that "wins" mass adoption is "better"?
No, just that it's more fit.
Which is the exact same thing natural selection in nature implies. An animal that spreads is not "better" -- it's just more fit for it's environment.
For an OS "more fit" can mean: faster, consuming less memory and with more control over it, usable in more situations and more hardware, cheaper to run, leveraging existing libraries, etc. It doesn't have to be "better" as in "less prone to crash", "safer" etc.
The parent mentioned SUN experimenting with a Java OS. What a joke would that be, given that SUN's experiments with a similarly needy application (a Java web browser) ended in utter failure, with a slow as molasses outcome.
Sure, it would run better with the resources we have now. But a C OS like linux also runs much better with the resources we have now -- so the gap remains.
It's not like we have exhausted the need for speed in an OS (on the contrary). It's not also like, apart from MS Windows of old, we have much problems with the core OS crashing or having security issues.
In fact, I haven't seen a kernel panic on OS X for like 3-4 years. And my Linux machines don't seem to have any kernel problems either -- except sometimes with the graphics drivers.
So, no, I don't think we're at the point where a GC OS would make sense for actual use.
ARC, an example the parent gives, fine as it might be, doesn't cover all cases in Objective-C. Tons of performance critical, lower level stuff still happens in C-land, and needs manual resource management, it's just transparent to the Cocoa level.
No, just that it's more fit.
Which is the exact same thing natural selection in nature implies. An animal that spreads is not "better" -- it's just more fit for it's environment.
For an OS "more fit" can mean: faster, consuming less memory and with more control over it, usable in more situations and more hardware, cheaper to run, leveraging existing libraries, etc. It doesn't have to be "better" as in "less prone to crash", "safer" etc.
The parent mentioned SUN experimenting with a Java OS. What a joke would that be, given that SUN's experiments with a similarly needy application (a Java web browser) ended in utter failure, with a slow as molasses outcome.
Sure, it would run better with the resources we have now. But a C OS like linux also runs much better with the resources we have now -- so the gap remains.
It's not like we have exhausted the need for speed in an OS (on the contrary). It's not also like, apart from MS Windows of old, we have much problems with the core OS crashing or having security issues.
In fact, I haven't seen a kernel panic on OS X for like 3-4 years. And my Linux machines don't seem to have any kernel problems either -- except sometimes with the graphics drivers.
So, no, I don't think we're at the point where a GC OS would make sense for actual use.
ARC, an example the parent gives, fine as it might be, doesn't cover all cases in Objective-C. Tons of performance critical, lower level stuff still happens in C-land, and needs manual resource management, it's just transparent to the Cocoa level.