Damn, I was hoping for a MacOS version of SysInternals.
macOS Internals
41–50 of 146 posts
Re: macOS Internals
#42It’s funny how I used to think that operating systems, databases, and cloud systems, as these kind of arcane things that were somehow apart from the rest of software. I could not begin to grasp how they could deal with running programs, access control, or any of these things that once seemed so foreign and mysterious to me. And realising that it’s actually just software, that there’s no black magic to it, just lower-…
If you wanted to learn, I really recommend Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (OSTEP). I thought it was excellent and pretty easy to follow. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
There are many things in OSTEP that I found really eye opening. One thing that stuck with me was that at some point, when discussing virtualization, it referred to an OS as a virtual machine, and that really changed the way I look at operating systems now.
> That is, the OS takes a physical resource (such as the processor, or memory, or a disk) and transforms it into a more general, powerful, and easy-to-use virtual form of itself. Thus, we sometimes refer to the operating system as a virtual machine.
Re: macOS Internals
#43Damn, I was hoping for a MacOS version of SysInternals.
Me too. I think the closest is Xcode Additional Tools.
Re: macOS Internals
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's turtles all the way down. Layers of abstraction stacked on layers of abstraction.
Until you get to the physics of transistors and logic gates :) Though I suppose in a sense, even subatomic particles are abstractions over quarks. It’s just that those are no longer abstractions we control.
I realized the brilliance of the name Quartz for the graphics framework. It’s what happens to “rendered” silicon.
Re: macOS Internals
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you get to the physics of transistors and logic gates :) Though I suppose in a sense, even subatomic particles are abstractions over quarks. It’s just that those are no longer abstractions we control.
Yup. APIs and constraints all make engineering sense. Turtles, all the way down... except when you get to quantum mechanics, that stuff is whack.
>QM is whack
Very much so. But I also think it always had to be that way. A universe of infinite classical regression (atoms made of atoms made of atoms...) would be more insane than whack.
Re: macOS Internals
#46It’s funny how I used to think that operating systems, databases, and cloud systems, as these kind of arcane things that were somehow apart from the rest of software. I could not begin to grasp how they could deal with running programs, access control, or any of these things that once seemed so foreign and mysterious to me. And realising that it’s actually just software, that there’s no black magic to it, just lower-…
It still kind of blows my mind that basically all this reduces to assembly and then machine language.
I’m of the age where my first computing experiences were on green screens, PET computers, networked VAX machines at the colleges my parents taught at and so on.
I was aware of what assembly was back then, and the idea that the game or basic business program I was using was just a sequence of MOVE ADD eax and so on. I just couldn’t quite get how you could be smart enough to use that to something useful.
And everything we see today is basically just a bunch of moves and adds and pokes a layer or three below the surface.
Re: macOS Internals
#47It’s funny how I used to think that operating systems, databases, and cloud systems, as these kind of arcane things that were somehow apart from the rest of software. I could not begin to grasp how they could deal with running programs, access control, or any of these things that once seemed so foreign and mysterious to me. And realising that it’s actually just software, that there’s no black magic to it, just lower-…
If you wanted to learn, I really recommend Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (OSTEP). I thought it was excellent and pretty easy to follow. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
Thanks!
Re: macOS Internals
#48That’s super interesting.
Re: macOS Internals
#49That's great!
Now, bonus time: Let's do something like that for SwiftUI.
Re: macOS Internals
#50History is such a great way to learn anything. It’s interesting - like a mystery revealed, but also provides the why - why things are the way they are. I was looking into accounting the other day, and you can go back to the first document that mentioned credit and debit and introduced modern accounting. There are so many topics like this that seem confusing and arbitrary but it all began extremely simply and pragmati…
This is so true.
Most of math starts to make sense once you know the history behind the concepts.