unix flavorality

I am now happily back on OSX. The core of darwin (unix portion of Mac OS X) is really funky. I remember when I was first messing around with it, I was like WTF. Evene the kernel and start-protocol is a funky mix of NExtStep, OpenStep and NEtBSD calls/routines. then blended in upper layer with AIX, IRIX and linux style commands. As I understand it's not quite as funky anymore as a lot flows through the Cocoa intepreter. However being in bioscience/biotech a lot of the calc programs are meant to run though a unix based OS. They will never be a fancy GUI for PAUP, ARP or other like programs. These is very suffisticate phylogentic, bioinformatic and compuation biology programs.

When I had an intel-based PC I tried many OS flavors. Often they where slow and behaved in a very bloated often. Real compiling my kernals with specific options really imporved the efficiency but was a headache... not because of diffculty, but rather in time consumption.

I tried a couple of linux distros on my 2001 iBook. I was really suprised how fast and effecient the straight binaries where. The kernel was already really tweaked with my YellowDog distro. Debian PPC distros didn't produce the same results per-say still a lot fast... 500Mhz 740GX PPC (iBook) vs 1.1Ghz P3... the PC also had twice as much ram which was faster.

I do have to admit though side by side... the P3 while MUCH slower in loading and general tasks was able to handle large multi-treaded tasks with a greater amount of ease.

It kind of makes me concerned that able is added intel and plausible bloat. Now as a developer I have looked at the way intel code is planning to to handel. I might be fine especially is they keep the distro's seperate. however in the developer kit, you can add specialized code so for Cocoa translation on intel machine. It's actually not hard to transition of have a binary that is equally exucatable on both chipset, cocoa makes it a lot easier though. I am just hoping again all this extra code doesn't bloat OSX that much more... Tiger made such leaps and bounds with module loading and kernel initialization.