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To: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 09 Nov 2005 16:23:28 EST."
	<1A496451-166E-46F1-8363-19F117156FEE@mac.com> 
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 23:18:43 +0100
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Cc: Marcin Jessa <lists@yazzy.org>, Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>,
	current@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Generic Kernel API 
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In message <1A496451-166E-46F1-8363-19F117156FEE@mac.com>, Charles Swiger write
s:

>Apple has found that using inheritance is a big win for them: "In  
>addition, code reusability decreases the memory footprint of drivers;  
>drivers ported from Mac OS 9, for example, have been up to 75%  
>smaller in Mac OS X."  Of course, it's easier to say such things then  
>to write the code, but Apple has achieved pretty good results from  
>the IOKit.

Apple also has significantly better control over the hardware
they have to write drivers for.

That said, there is a lot of stuff which could be improved in our
APIs.

And I wouldn't mind getting a "C with classes" language with a couple
of domain-specific extensions in the bargain.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.