When I worked on video systems at Apple I got dinged on a performance review for negatively comparing their kernel to Linux too many times. I’m pretty sure they still have a dogshit IO scheduler but I haven’t used a Mac in ages.

I suspect it’s not that people can’t do the work and more that Apple’s silos mean their already employed engineers are not allowed to try or even talk about it.

That's interesting, are there some benchmarks that prove the inferiority of the Mac scheduler? (Without getting you into an NDA trouble, of course.)

I don't think it matters as much any more now that we don't have spinning disks with slow seek times.

For things like Final Cut/iMovie with lots of video/audio/misc tracks, it was trivial to saturate the disk with dumb seeks when reading otherwise linear data streams due to a lack of nobs.

> dinged on a performance review for negatively comparing their kernel... engineers are not allowed to try or even talk about it

I wonder if it was possibly not that you compared the kernels but rather how you chose to express the comparison. For example this bit makes me think you possibly expressed your opinion combatively:

> a dogshit IO scheduler

Perhaps you were more polite in your day-to-day, I don't know. But your language here makes me wonder.

Just World Fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

More like, One Side of the Story :)

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/some...

To be fair, all anecdotes are one side of a story :-)

You seem to be extrapolating a lot from a single turn of phrase but the fact remains that while Apple's kernel is satisfactory, it's not really considered best of bread in anything other than maybe dtrace support.

So I'm sorry I offended you with my salty language but the evidence suggests I'm far from the only one that went ignored at Apple.

> I'm sorry I offended you

You didn't.

Some people seem unaware that others take issue with how they communicate and not what they communicate

the way you are responding to some one who asked you a pretty mild question (assuming they were personally offended rather than asking about a potential communication issue) suggests there is some validity here.

I don't think it was mild, they more or less implied I was an asshole at work because they didn't like an adjective I used years after the fact.

Sure the phrasing was gentle, but the actual statement was quite offensive, presumptuous, and prudish.

There's lots of them but long long gone are the days when the guy who's working on Network blah blah for Azure is allowed to do anything with Windows. Silos are good except when they become Ivory Towers which is what they have become. Sadly it seems some sort of modern managerial style since it infects almost every corporation these days.

AFAIK Dave Cutler is still there but he's been moved off the Windows team -- first to Xbox of all places and then to cloud, maybe?

Most well known names that are still around have moved either into Azure or DevDiv (which I think now is under Azure as well).

Which is probably the root cause of the GUI civil war happening between all desktop frameworks.

"Been moved" strongly implies that it wasn't his choice. Cutler worked on some really cool Virtualization problems in Xbox and is bringing that expertise to Azure as well.

I had this book when it first came out and it was fantastic, coming from a pretty hard core Unix background.

Inside Windows NT from Microsoft Press

https://a.co/d/1lxwnQt