Really? You think this made #1 on the front page because people are excited that you can run ls from Darwin on a non-iPhone ARM7 system that's really running Linux? Which has its own ls?
No, people saw the headline and voted it up thinking that "binary compatibility" with iPhone meant compatibility with iPhone 5.0, not just with Darwin. I bet most didn't even read the article first.
Honestly, if there's not even an eventual goal to run iOS apps, I don't see the point. Linux is there underneath already, and just about anything you could compile for Darwin could be compiled for Linux. What iOS "binaries" exist (other than apps) that would make such an environment useful?
I understand (from the FAQ) that the author doesn't even ATTEMPT to justify the project's existence. That's FINE. Not slighting the developer. Sometimes you climb a mountain Because It's There (TM).
But the excitement around it was generated because of a deception.
>Really? You think this made #1 on the front page because people are excited that you can run ls from Darwin on a non-iPhone ARM7 system that's really running Linux? Which has its own ls? No, people saw the headline and voted it up thinking that "binary compatibility" with iPhone meant compatibility with iPhone 5.0, not just with Darwin. I bet most didn't even read the article first
Not that I agree with your explanation about why the article got upvotes, even if this was the case, it doesn't matter.
There was ABSOLUTELY no deception. The title uses a well known technical term, and uses it appropriately.
If _some_ people thought the title meant it can also run Cocoa Touch apps, instead of merely be binary compatible with them, that's _their bloody problem_.
This is Hacker News, they're supposed to know this kind of thing.
Should the title have been:
"Magenta - "It is fully binary compatible with iPhone OS 5.0, and by fully binary compatible, I mean it in the actual LITERAL technical way and NOT that iOS libraries are also implemented, which has nothing to do with 'binary compatibility' you newbs!", to avoid "deception"?
Dude, I've done most of the CS sequence in college (majored in cognitive science). I've been a professional programmer for 25 years. I do C/C++ development currently, and once upon a time created entire games in assembly language.
I read HN, Communications of the ACM, and other technical sites and blogs to keep up on the state of the art. I designed an SDK that was used in over a hundred commercial products based entirely on its technical merits, and people have been coming to me asking to pay to license my current (not yet public) SDK, based on the merits of my last one.
I submit that since I was deceived by the statement, that it was deceptive. Period.
And as Camillo pointed out, it's frequently applied to libraries. Correctly, I might add, when those libraries are built into shared objects. The ABI [1] needs to match, for example, for them to have binary compatibility.
A good example of such libraries would be the entire set of iOS libraries that would be implied by saying "binary compatible with iPhone OS 5.0."
See [2] if you don't believe me. "Binary compatibility" refers to the ability to run programs built for an OS, and not just the lowest levels of the OS, but the whole thing.
A clear title would be "Magenta: Binary compatible with Darwin (the iOS 5 kernel)." A better title might have been "Magenta: Run Darwin (iOS) binaries on top of Linux."
No, people saw the headline and voted it up thinking that "binary compatibility" with iPhone meant compatibility with iPhone 5.0, not just with Darwin. I bet most didn't even read the article first.
Honestly, if there's not even an eventual goal to run iOS apps, I don't see the point. Linux is there underneath already, and just about anything you could compile for Darwin could be compiled for Linux. What iOS "binaries" exist (other than apps) that would make such an environment useful?
I understand (from the FAQ) that the author doesn't even ATTEMPT to justify the project's existence. That's FINE. Not slighting the developer. Sometimes you climb a mountain Because It's There (TM).
But the excitement around it was generated because of a deception.