Bertrand Serlet to leave Apple
apple.com
apple.com
Bertrand is a truly amazing and, I feel, wholly under-appreciated engineer and manager. He knew the technology better than pretty much anyone at Apple, and he stayed involved in all of the nitty-gritty details including participating in some of the internal engineer mailing list discussions.
One story I can relate that I think illustrates the point: Inside Apple there is a system to search the source code for every product they ship. The idea is that when you need to track down the definition of that primitive method that keeps crashing on you, you just go to this site, type in the function name, and get the source laid out in front of you (nicely syntax highlighted, of course). Well, one day I got the idea to use this tool to search for people, instead of functions. For a while now the policy at Apple has been that engineer's names don't go in the public headers that ship...but there's no rule about internal code that the outside world will never see. So I typed in "Bertrand Serlet" into the search, and the first thing that popped up?
malloc.c
Seriously! The rest of the list was equally impressive including the original implementation of NSObject, a bunch of CoreFoundation, and on, and on. Avi Tevanian often gets credit for the work that he did on Mach, but Bertrand was most of the brains behind Cocoa.
Anyway, I could go on, but I'll just say that if I could have one wish as a programmer it would be to get to work with Bertrand Serlet again.
However, Serlet, despite no longer writing code, was incredibly stubborn about any changes to his pet implementations, even 10-20 years later. This included large changes, such as updating malloc to a more modern implementation (see Jason Evan's later work on jemalloc), and small changes, such as updating top(1) to better match its Linux and BSD counterparts and implement a standardized library (libtop) for accessing process/host statistics (he wrote top, too).
Serlet was like many technical individuals that graduated into fulltime management; stuck with the last technology they'd worked on, as it was when they last worked on it. Avie was the same with his fixation on Mach, and Mac OS X was honestly poorer for it.
As for malloc, I find it hard to believe that he was stubborn about changes. The one chance I had to sit and have coffee with Bertrand, we discussed what API's we'd most like to rewrite given infinite time/resources. His answer was "malloc". I think rather than being stuck with the last technology, he had a difficult time balancing the pressures of change with the need for consistence, and did so admirably.
Oh, and as for top…when they did change it in early SnowLeopard builds, it broke a whole host of tooling, etc., and they had to revert some changes...
As to the rest; my point was that Bertrand was very opposed to change in 'his' code, not that he wasn't open to any change. Regarding malloc, I think Bertrand still thought he'd be best suited to do it, and he has always objected strenuously to others approaching his problems.
Oh, and as for top…when they did change it in early SnowLeopard builds, it broke a whole host of tooling, etc., and they had to revert some changes...
That's pretty normal when tools depend on text output of commands (something Core OS has told everyone not to do, and then they do anyway). The initial conversion to modern top/libtop actually occurred back in the 10.{1,2,3} release cycles, and was subject to a very heavy amount of push-back and compromise with Bertrand about "his" top(1) :)
I also feel that as time moved on, Bertrand was making more bad decisions, but that this might have been a consequence of pressure from the top. It may not look like it to the outside observer, but there is a major metamorphosis going on at Apple internally. I think this move will be for the best for Bertrand. As for Apple... * shrug *
...oh, and thanks for bringing back memories of the Core OS "you're doing it wrong, stupid" lessons I got so familiar with. If only we could all be so perfect as Core OS! ;-)
Bertrand Serlet on private API's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd97us27eSg
1. Steve Jobs out of action for a while
2. Jonny Ive not wanting to extend his stay in the US and going back to England
3. Oppenheimer out, looking for a new CFO with deal making capabilities
4. Bertrand Serlet out and an internet veteran taking his place
[2] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/27/ive-due-30m-stock-windfall-ma...
[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-07/apple-s-overture-to...
Also: TUAW rivals the National Inquirer on reliability of their news. You shouldn't cite them if you want your points taken seriously.
I'm guessing that he's set for life financially and that he'd basically have his pick of jobs or freelance work so while it might not be Apple, he's going to do fine.
But a recent newspaper article (it was the Daily Mail so I use the term newspaper loosely) said he wasn't looking to move back here and there was no truth to the rumour. No idea what their source but probably about as reliable / unreliable as the source of the original rumour which was pretty speculative to say the least.
I mean - imagine Vista, or Win 7 going on the phone, just with a new touch UI framework added. It simply wouldn't work, couldn't work, would be impossible, beyond the reach of the richest software company in the world.
Sometimes, good engineering does pay off, and ultimately one could say that iOS is a direct result of good engineering. Every time the iOS wins it's a win for good design, and for object oriented programming.
That said, the dark side of being so far ahead of everyone for so long is a severe case of NIH syndrome at Apple. Those times when others surprisingly better Apple, Apple takes a very long time to catch up. Dev tools are the best example with XCode 10 years behind Eclipse. MobileMe Mail is perhaps another one: MobileMe Mail is similar to Mail.app on OS X - but Gmail is way better than that, and has been pretty much from the beginning.
Are you trying to imply that the base OS is bloated? Or, are you trying to imply that the UI frameworks are bloated?
Apple didn't just port Mac OS X to the iOS platform, they more accurately ported the underlying Darwin OS to it, and added UIKit and other specialized frameworks.
I think they were more concerned with preserving certain frameworks and their time-to-market given iOS & Android's market dominance.
Honestly, I don't have much confidence that Microsoft will get it right, in the long run.
I'm not a fan/foe of Microsoft, merely an observer, but I think their days of greatness are long past.
I must admit I've never seen this stated anywhere official, I just assumed it based on the fact that the minimum footprint for WES is 40MB, which was the same figure quoted for MinWin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minwin#Releases
An interesting excerpt (iirc, Eric demoed this in a Channel 9 video):
In October 2007, Eric Traut, a developer at Microsoft, demonstrated a self-contained MinWin system, made up of about 100 files, on which a basic HTTP server was running.[10][11] Traut noted that MinWin takes up about 25 MB on disk and has a working set (memory usage) of 40 MB. It lacked a graphical user interface and is interfaced using a full-screen command line interface. Traut explained during the demo that MinWin would not be offered as a stand-alone product, but would instead be used as the basis for future operating system releases such as Windows 7.
http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/03/celebrating-betrand-serle...
[...]
Much love, Bertrand. O traveler of time, you have brought a vision of peace to our galaxy, not to mention a great deal of truly sweet software. For your countless contributions to our company and to our planet, we thank you.
From Fake Steeve Jobs, Nov. 2007
http://www.fakesteve.net/2007/11/bertrand-serlet-recalled-to...
The Xcode 4 interface should not imitate iTunes.
When I want to build my project I do not want to press a play button.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vs2010rtm.png
Could there be a more universal idiom in the world of IDEs?
He said BUILD, not RUN. A Play button is to build and RUN the project. I agree with his objection: There's no Build button in the UI.
And even worse is the width of the combined drop-down list for configurations. There's a vast expanse of empty space in the (now non-customizable) toolbar, and they made this control SMALLER. The information it should be providing is cut off in all cases, even with short project names. I try to be sympathetic to the Xcode team's tasks, but this is idiotic.
But then they end up doing things like throwing out a working documentation viewer and replacing it with a new design that doesn't work.
The new design has its problems, but this kind of feedback isn't specific enough.
The team did try to clean up the mess, and were successful in some areas. A modern, single-window design is laudable. But the document handling is just abysmal, as it has always been in Xcode.
The tabs don't make sense (they're even upside-down); the "counterpart" button is gone; you can't split the editor without invoking this misguided "assistant"; error messages appear in this narrow column on the left, so of course they're truncated to the point of uselessness and if you go to the results and put them in the main editing pane, it doesn't pull up the relevant source code at the same time.
Aside from the document-handling fiasco, there are lots of plain old bugs in Xcode 4. Worst of all is that it simply won't build a lot of projects that worked fine in Xcode 3, stopping people's work in its tracks.
Did anyone else notice how the press release was so heavily focused on Steve Jobs? It could almost be read as: Jobs is at the helm, and don't worry, he'll be okay.