Blaine Garst
Technology impact: At Bell Labs as System V lead he, with Bill Joy of SUN, co-authored the original SVR4 specification that later led to POSIX and clean-room UNIX everywhere, eliminating all other UNIX variants save linux. At NeXT, his Objective-C @protocol "interfaces" and memory management and base class meta architecture and base classes (runtime and NXLock deployed into the kernel even), transformed NeXT. Sources sold to Sun, reduced, they became Java to such a 1:1 degree that his JavaBridge hybrid object, ObjC on the bottom, Java on top, enabled NeXT to deploy a business sophisticated database backed WebObjects in 1996 and was successful enough to file S3 papers to go public. Apple bought NeXT instead.
At Apple, as co-architect of MacOS/Cocoa, for example heintroduced Closures (MacOS 10.6 Snowleopart) and Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) that empowered App explosion. Blaine is the reason Mac/iOS apps don't pause.
At ISO/IEC WG14, introduced _Atomic in C11, and was chosen to wrangle all defect fixes into C17.
At his California "Social Purpose" (B corp without hassles) Planet Earth Society, his 10 year deep dive into all things Actors and unhackable is, he claims, his best work ever. His version 3 is called TheDew.
Links
- My never need a job LinkedIn profile, see about section
- https://
- Part 1 Computer History Museum interview
- WG14 C documents, see Garst
- WG14 version of Apple WWDC talk
Events
| Title | Day | Room | Track | Start | End |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unhackable across 30 Years, End in Sight | Saturday | D.microkernel | Microkernel and Component-based OS | 17:05 | 18:00 |