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Don’t let its elegant and easy-to-use interface fool you. Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation hard at work to ensure that your computing experience remains free of system crashes and compromised performance. With its advanced virtual memory, you don’t have to concern yourself over the number of applications you have open — just continue working. If an application should ever crash, the system’s memory protection prevents it from taking the rest of the system down with it. And the time-tested security protocols in Mac OS X keep your Mac out of harm’s way.
The most widely-distributed UNIX-based operating system, Mac OS X offers a unique combination of technical elements to the discerning geek, such as the fine-grained multithreading of the Mach 3.0 kernel, tight hardware integration and SMP-safe drivers, as well as zero configuration networking. Panther integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 5 into Darwin — the Open Source, UNIX-based foundation of Mac OS X — to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability.  Command-line environment UNIX users will feel at home in Darwin, the robust UNIX-based environment that underlies Mac OS X. That environment is accessible at any time from the Terminal application. You can also run commands that don’t require arguments (such as top) by double-clicking them in the Finder. With the thousands of man pages included in Mac OS X, you can quickly find all your favorite UNIX tools. UNIX utilities and scripting languages All of the standard UNIX utilities and scripting languages are included in Mac OS X: editors such as emacs, vim and pico; file management tools such as cp, mv, ls and gnutar; shell scripts including bash (the default shell), tcsh (csh) and zsh; and scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, tcl, Ruby and Python. Python users can also script the powerful Quartz compositing engine. Learn more in the Mac OS X for Unix Users technology brief. And visit our Open Source page for a list of Open Source utilities in Mac OS X. Universal libraries 
Mac OS X provides a robust set of optimized libraries, making it easy to port your existing UNIX code. For example, a standard, multithreaded C library (libc) includes support for such capabilities as reentrant variants of standard functions (such as strtok_r), facilitating the porting of thread-aware applications to Mac OS X. For applications that require non-Roman character sets, Mac OS X supports wide character datatypes (wchar_t and others). Panther also supports UNIX/Linux portability APIs, including System V semaphores, so porting applications from versions of UNIX such as Linux and Solaris presents no problem.
Kernel A key factor in the stability of the system is its advanced memory protection and management system, which ensure reliability by allocating a unique address space for each application or process. The Mach kernel augments standard virtual memory semantics with the abstraction of memory objects. This enables Mac OS X to manage separate application environments simultaneously and supply the following features:
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 Open Source Learn about Open Source projects in Mac OS X. 
X11 for Mac OS X — Use legacy UNIX-based programs via the X11R6.6 Windows display server integrated with Quartz compositor.FreeBSD 5 — Use the latest commands and libraries from the popular FreeBSD distribution. gcc 3.3 — Generate code using the latest C, C++, Objective-C open source compiler with optimizations for the G5 processor. Kerberized Safari — Browse Intranet networks with single-sign on. pstopdf command line tool — Convert PostScript Level 3 documents to PDF via command line tool. Updated UNIX man pages — Learn system command line tools more easily with significant update to collection of system man pages. Activity Monitor — Display processes, CPU, system memory, disk activity and networking status via new utility. Improved Terminal Application — Use command line tools via Terminal, now with improved emulation and double-byte encodings. Kerberized SMB, AFP, SSH, Mail — Use system services that support Kerberos single-sign on authentication tickets. Latest Scripting Languages — Use the best tool for the job by selecting from a full collection of UNIX scripting languages, such as Perl, PHP and Python, updated to latest versions. Rendezvous Browsing for ssh, sftp, ftp, telnet — Browse several UNIX connection protocols via Connect to Server in Terminal. Terminal Dock Menu — Create new shell, issue new command or connect to server directly from Dock. X11 Dock Menu — Activate X11 applications directly from the Dock icon. |
