Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!spool.mu.edu!uunet!shaman!jiro
From: jiro@shaman.com (Jiro Nakamura)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NX_VOID, Release 2.1 and Lighthouse Design
Message-ID: <1991Jun26.144145.11129@shaman.com>
Date: 26 Jun 91 14:41:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: shaman.1991Jun26.144145.11129
References: <1991Jun26.023443.27660@ni.umd.edu>
Sender: jiro@shaman.com (Jiro Nakamura)
Organization: Shaman Consulting
Lines: 32

In article <1991Jun26.023443.27660@ni.umd.edu> louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A.  
Mamakos) writes:
> I was cleaning up my disk today, and happened across the NX_VOID game
> that the Lighthouse folks wrote and released years ago.  And guess
> what?  It works just fine on a 68040, Release 2.1 NeXTstation.  I
> guess that I'm not supposed to be surpised or anything, but I'm rather
> pleased that you can write a program that does what NX_VOID does, and
> play by all of the rules.  When you play by the rules, things keep
> working!

   I see another person who has been brainwashed by the Mac world. ;-)
   Yes, I think the NeXT is *much* more stable between version releases
than the Mac ever was. It also helps that the OS isn't going to change
much since it already has much of what we need. Only the appkit is going
to change and NeXT has made it pretty apparent that things following the
API will be backwardly supported at least one revision level.
   Most of the things that broke from 1.0 to 2.0 were doing strange
things at the system level, or depended on files being certain places.
   Although I'm sad that we don't have a lot of technical documentation
about the guts of NeXTStep (such as say: Inside Macintosh), it also makes
the lives of end-users simpler, I would say.
   What I think should be a high, high, high priority for NeXT is guarranteeing
that *nothing* can crash the window server.  As a developer, I can conjure
up apps that can crash the server consistently (unfortunately, I do this
non-deliberately). This is a Bad Thing and harks of Mac-dom. No application
should be able to crash WM, end of story.

    - jiro
-- 
Jiro Nakamura				jiro@shaman.com
Shaman Consulting			+1 607 277-1440 Voice/Fax/Data
"Bring your dead, dying shamans here!"