Re: swarm support (was compare swarm with repast)

[Marcus G. Daniels]

> There exists the idea under the swarm developers that OSX is cool, but 
> not to be taken seriously.  If we could change the believes of the 
> agents, we would get another behavior from them.  


OS X is a based on Darwin, a BSD-like system based on the Mach microkernel.
The microkernel has had numerous extensions (loadable kernel drivers) 
and optimizations (RPC calls optimized into function calls) and the 
system as a whole works pretty well now.  At the application level,  OS 
X is a very usable system.  The Microsoft Office suite is elegant, and 
the Chimera Netscape browser renders beautiful text via Quartz.  

On the toolchain side, Apple has an active compiler team and their 
extensions like precompiled headers will probably be incorporated into 
the mainline GCC sources over time, or at least inspire a new 
implementation.  Altivec SIMD support is in the latest release of stock 
GCC.  Likewise, device support is very good.  Firewire devices work 
better on Mac OS X than on Linux-based systems or Microsoft Windows, for 
example.

So I'd say I'd have as good as grasp as anyone here where Mac OS X is at 
these days.  
The reason this "swarm developer" is not working on this project is 
simply because no one has provided me with an incentive to do that.   
(Other than that it is a "good idea" or whatever.)




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