![]() For example, on the Mac, I expect to be able to triple-click on a word and have it select the entire sentence. Unfortunately, macOS has gotten to the level of popularity that it just can't be as Dev-friendly asĪs someone who works regularly in all three major OSes (five if you count iOS and Android), I can tell you that Apple spends a great deal of time on their user experience. I think "security through obscurity" is the word.Īpple has to tightened macOS down, because fucking subhuman cyberterrorists relentlessly and viciously poke and prod at every conceivable framework and OS command to the point where it gets harder and harder to have a system that harkens back to a time where you could just depend on simple Unix permissions to keep curious paws out of dangerous places in the OS. I think "open" is the word to describe this. Heck, there is H.264 acceleration in the Pi, and it's exposed by the V4L2 apis for any userspace program to use (ffmpeg, etc). There isn't as much performance as mainstream machines, but there's plenty enough. ![]() And for hardware tasks, a Pi actually does provide a lot of surface area for a hardware engineer to work with. Linux, on the other hand, rather straight forward to compile and load. (newer macOS even prefers a userspace solution with better security, but i digress) ![]() Building them yourself isn't as easy as it had been only a few years ago, even with a dev account. macOS is among the OSes that have almost eliminated access, requiring all loadable kernel extensions to be signed by Apple. Sometimes the project manager has to declare the project finished and move on to the next version.īut is that the presumed bloat of programs we're worried about? Certainly Windows is pretty bĪlso with an approachable kernel space that mere mortals not only have control over, but can extend. It is an example of perfect becoming the enemy of good enough. And the tweaking process to produce nearly perfect software would have the competition releasing possibly bloated, but available software a generation or two newer while you tinker trying to produce a masterpiece of optimization. Give them the fastest development environment you can get them but force them to dogfood the release builds on bottom end hardware? Dunno. But sadly the nature of the consoles was that if your code got too slow things didn't just run slow, it wouldn't do anything useful at all. If I had been able to delay the optimisation step until closer to the end things might have been better. I know when I did graphics programming on old consoles sometimes I'd discard an idea because the thought of ripping out and redoing a meticulously optimised chunk of code to accommodate a new idea just didn't appeal. However if your developers have to prematurely optimise just to get stuff done in reasonable timeframes you wind up with poor quality somewhere. I'm lazy in one direction and not the other. I've done a great deal of optimisation of the software here because I'd rather figure out how to get queries down to reasonable execution times on the hardware that's there than deploy a new fleet of servers. One of my old team leads had a good point - if developers developed on slow machines, then modern software wouldn't be so bloated because they'd be the first to subjected to their own dogshit programming.
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