Why is macOS's init system written in a GC language

macOS does not support Garbage Collection, yet the very init system it runs on is written in a language that is by default Garbage Collected. This seems like a poor OS design, especially since reference counting is Apple's new MO. Any reason why this is?

Replies

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking here. Apple pulled launchd out of the open source a while ago so we can't look at the code anymore either.


The ARC support on Apple platforms comes from the compiler, not the language. Just because a language supports GC on another platform, it doesn't mean that it does on all of them.

What language are you talking about? Most of the OS-level code is in C, which definitely isn't garbage collected.