Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!apple!goldman
From: goldman@Apple.COM (Phil Goldman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: System 8.0: no more DA's.
Message-ID: <321@internal.Apple.COM>
Date: 15 Dec 88 20:18:09 GMT
References: <1988Dec14.223739.16280@cs.rochester.edu>
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA
Lines: 23

In article <1988Dec14.223739.16280@cs.rochester.edu> @DOUGHNUT.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU:miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU writes:
>It's something of a pity multifinder doesn't already do this; one could have
>a reasonable yet small IPC standard based on pointers to heap objects... and
>then consumers of a stream could run simultaneously with the producer,
>rather than the current braindamage of producing a file, switching to the
>next program, reading the file...

This has nothing to do with whether the multitasking is preemptive or not.
In fact, doing producer/consumer on shared memory *is* possible with
MultiFinder.  It is absolutely not necessary to do IPC thru files.

It is true that Apple is not yet officially supporting a full-blown
IPC mechanism, but there are numerous ways to do it already anyway.

As an aside to the person asking about TRUE multitasking in 8.0, MultiFinder
already supports true multitasking.  That is, it divvies up CPU time
between multiple applications.  If the reference is to preemptive multitasking,
then there is really no reason to get excited.  Preemptive multitasking
will make life a bit easier on developers, but not much, and have no
typical effect on users.  The only point at which preemptive multitasking is
more useful to a Mac end user is when he is using a buggy app.

-Phil Goldman
Apple Computer