Windows has a rich API but as more and more of the world moves to linux based systems (including bsd, solaris and mac os x), it’s becoming more and more of an island.  On the linux side, there is a lot to like but it’s always been a little rough around the edges.  The IDEs available are no match for Visual Studio and some utilities (like Xen) are a  pain to get working.  Still, for server work, Linux has a lot going for it.  First and foremost, the large selection of open source libraries.  Every now and then I lust over some of the very cool features in Solaris (like DTrace and ZFS) but the community was too small and many libraries did not have support for it.

Given the small installed base of Macs, especially on the server side, I never seriously considered the Mac OS X.   Then a funny thing happened.  I was investigating an idea fo the iPhone and was forced to get a Mac to do development.   And the more I used the Mac and learned about Mac OS X, the more I liked it.   This was a real surprise to me.

This morning, I’ve spent some time learning about what’s new in Snow Leopard (the latest version of OS X) and I’m impressed.  Apple is doing a lot of cool things.  First of all, OS X is sufficiently close to Linux that I could use it as my development enviroment.  And recently, Apple added DTrace (so no need to consider Solaris anymore).  In Snow Leopard, Apple is laying the foundation for easier multi-threading.  They’ve include something called Grand Central Dispatch and Blocks.  While all OSs support multi-threading, coding for it is a fairly advanced topic.   The best part is that Apple has released the source for Grand Central Dispatch as open source.  Let’s hope that this gets ported to Linux in short order.  Another cool technologies is OpenCL.  This allows you to create code that can run on the system GPU.  Traditionally, to harness the power available in today’s GPUs required chip specific coding.  OpenCL is generic and can even run on the CPU if it makes sense.

Now there are some things that I’m not sure I’m crazy about.  Objective-C for one.  No other OS has much support for this so anything created in Objective-C is OS X only.  I’m a cross-platform kind of guy so this is not a path that makes sense for me.  And some of the new features in Snow Leopard are OS X specific right now.  I like that Apple is willing to open source some of the key items though (like Grand Central Dispatch).  While my focus on software APIs, Mac OS X is a surprisingly nice client OS. I love how little extra software I’ve had to add. On a PC, the first thing I do on a new machine is load up a large number of extra software packages.  It’s easily several hours worth of work.  Other than added XCode (the Mac IDE), an out of the box Mac is pretty good to go. And Time Machine is very cool.  Even though I”ve had several hard disk crashes over the years, I don’t really do enough backups.  Time Machine is something every OS should have.  I’m surprised that Apple is the 1st company to get it right.

So today, I still use a PC as my main development enviroment.  But I’m at the point where I could easily see myself switching to the Mac as my primary computer.  Hats off to Apple for creating an OS that even a hard-code PC coder could love.