Sysadmin Field Notes

March 24, 2006

John Siracusa asserts that Apple has a lot of work to do to avoid a Copland style disaster.

His fundamental assertion is that managed API's will dominate in the future, because eventually they will be fast enough.

My argument is not that people have been saying that for years and that it's never "happened." While true, that's not the whole story. The real reason I don't think managed API's will take off is because the most heavily used, popular, and (most importantly) money-making applications are implemented in non-managed languages.

These applications have huge established codebases that represent a large investment. And it's very likely that low-level code will always be faster. So even though a newcomer may be able to add features at a faster rate (unlikely BTW, since the established vendor has a lot more money, manpower, experience, and mind-share), the established app is still going to be faster. For every managed app, there is always going to be a company willing to spend more in development, and produce a non-managed version that's faster.

Not to say it's not important. A lot of smaller, innovative apps will crop up, and they are going to want to go with whatever platform provides them the least amount of fuss. The difference between the above article and my point of view is that I think Objective-C with GC is good enough to get there. I'd say that most of the smaller, more innovative apps are showing up on Cocoa. Adding GC helps a bit more. Eventually morphing Objective-C into having a higher level, more managed option with the same programming paradigm could push things even further.

He's right about one thing though, Apple shouldn't rest on it's laurels. Enticing developers to the platform is about the most important thing they can be doing.