alt Hacker News> NeXTSTEP itself, while revolutionary in aspects, did not have long commercial success. However some of its ideas and technologies live on in Mac OS, after corporate M&A and consolidation in the tech sector.
On the contrary, macOS is NeXTSTEP plus several years of development. It's what the NS means in NSLog.
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It used to be, Tahoe is generations away from NeXTSTEP.
NeXTSTEP drivers were written in Objective-C, originally OS X used C++ subset based on COM (IO Kit), now moved into userspace and called Driver Kit, in homage to the NeXTSTEP DriverKit name.
NeXTSTEP was focused on OpenGL and Renderman, OS X used OpenGL, macOS is now using Metal.
NeXTSTEP drivers were on kernel space, now everything is moving into userspace.
NeXTSTEP used Display Postscript, OS X moved into PDF subset, nowadays that is only part of the rendering stack.
NeXTSTEP had a X Windows Server as well, on macOS that is now gone.
macOS Finder is nothing like the NeXTSTEP file application.
NeXTSTEP supported a concept similar to OLE, it is nowhere to be seen on macOS.
There's plenty of differences. The device driver stack and window server are all totally different.
And iOS of course is also derived from it.
I guess it's a bit more subtle.
The point that the article makes is about opening up NeXT to other hardware platforms. So while from one perspective, you might argue it lives on inside Apple, you could also argue that's where nextstep died.
In the early 2000s I worked for a company that went all in on NeXTSTEP a decade earlier. The product was developed in a "4 GL" called 4D or 4th dimension.
We had to do a painful migration to windows nt/xp because NeXTSTEP was discontinued and apple actively fought to kill attempts to fork or open source the code base.