AlanBarber.Org
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger Preview
I was just checking out the Apple website and ventured over into their preview page for the next release of Mac OS X v10.4 aka Tiger.
Most of the stuff isn’t that thrilling to me like say the new version of Safari, the Apple browser, or iChat AV. I could really care less about those things.
What does interest me and peak my geek radar are the core technology advances in the OS. There are 3 things specifically that caught my attention and have made Tiger stand out to me.
1) Enhanced UNIX Support
OS X is built from a UNIX core and with Tiger they bring in even more of the features. Most of these features actually come from FreeBSD 5.x. I’m a major fan and supporter of FreeBSD so to know OS X has a lot in common with FreeBSD makes me know their using a solid and reliable core. They point out several features including improved Optimized Kernel Resource Locking, 64-bit Compatibility, Access Control Lists, and Enhanced UNIX APIs.
The kernel locking is really the big there becuase it means they’ve improved system performance on SMP (dual cpu) machines.
2) Improved 64-bit Compatibility
The underlying Mac hardware are actually 64-bit cpus but really until now Mac OS X has just been a 32-bit OS with a few 64-bit tweaks. Tiger now provides more 64-bit compatibilty for applications. Basically they’ve added support for 64-bit pointers and now provide a 64-bit version of libSystem.
3) Xcode 2.0
This is the one thing that I wish Microsoft would do. Apple gives away a complete full featured developer platform for free! There are two improvements to Xcode. First is the use of the gcc 3.5 compiler and second is the support for the new 64-bit features in Tiger.
Apple has slowly but surely kept making OS X better and better. With a few more releases I have to admit that I might just end up breaking down and getting myself a Mac. Who knew I’d every say that?!?
It would never be my main rig, sorry I’ll always be a Microsoftie at heart, but I would like a nice G5 with a big Apple Cinema Display to do cross-platform development work on.
on 06/29/2004 at 09:17 PM