

Bertrand Serlet to leave Apple - cstuder
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/03/23serlet.html

======
jballanc
Well...I can't say I didn't see it coming (recent ex-Apple engineer here), and
I'm happy for Bertrand, but Apple is loosing an extremely valuable asset.

Bertrand is a truly amazing and, I feel, wholly under-appreciated engineer and
manager. He knew the technology better than pretty much anyone at Apple, and
he stayed involved in all of the nitty-gritty details including participating
in some of the internal engineer mailing list discussions.

One story I can relate that I think illustrates the point: Inside Apple there
is a system to search the source code for every product they ship. The idea is
that when you need to track down the definition of that primitive method that
keeps crashing on you, you just go to this site, type in the function name,
and get the source laid out in front of you (nicely syntax highlighted, of
course). Well, one day I got the idea to use this tool to search for people,
instead of functions. For a while now the policy at Apple has been that
engineer's names don't go in the public headers that ship...but there's no
rule about internal code that the outside world will never see. So I typed in
"Bertrand Serlet" into the search, and the first thing that popped up?

malloc.c

Seriously! The rest of the list was equally impressive including the original
implementation of NSObject, a bunch of CoreFoundation, and on, and on. Avi
Tevanian often gets credit for the work that he did on Mach, but Bertrand was
most of the brains behind Cocoa.

Anyway, I could go on, but I'll just say that if I could have one wish as a
programmer it would be to get to work with Bertrand Serlet again.

~~~
nupark
Speaking as a former Apple engineer in Core OS, this is a bit too glowing.
Serlet wrote quite a bit of code in the NeXT days, much of which does not meet
what you would call modern best practices, and even when written was fairly
unusual.

However, Serlet, despite no longer writing code, was incredibly stubborn about
any changes to his pet implementations, even 10-20 _years_ later. This
included large changes, such as updating malloc to a more modern
implementation (see Jason Evan's later work on jemalloc), and small changes,
such as updating top(1) to better match its Linux and BSD counterparts and
implement a standardized library (libtop) for accessing process/host
statistics (he wrote top, too).

Serlet was like many technical individuals that graduated into fulltime
management; stuck with the last technology they'd worked on, as it was when
they last worked on it. Avie was the same with his fixation on Mach, and Mac
OS X was honestly poorer for it.

~~~
jballanc
Heh, ok…I'll take that. I find your perspective a bit entertaining coming from
Core OS (I was on Server, as it so happens). At least, when I was there Core
OS had a reputation as being the more "academic" and "by the book" group.
That's compared to Frameworks, which was much more pragmatic than dogmatic.
One of the things I admired was how Bertrand managed those conflicting
viewpoints with some grace. Of course, things being what they were, I'd expect
someone from Core OS to blame Bertrand for being too "old fashioned". At the
same time I know plenty of people from Frameworks who were upset that he
"adopted new technology too soon"…there was especially a lot of that with
respect to libdispatch.

As for malloc, I find it hard to believe that he was stubborn about changes.
The one chance I had to sit and have coffee with Bertrand, we discussed what
API's we'd most like to rewrite given infinite time/resources. His answer was
"malloc". I think rather than being stuck with the last technology, he had a
difficult time balancing the pressures of change with the need for
consistence, and did so admirably.

Oh, and as for top…when they _did_ change it in early SnowLeopard builds, it
broke a whole host of tooling, etc., and they had to revert some changes...

~~~
nupark
Given where Core OS sits in the software stack (kernel, libc, file systems,
etc), being "academic" and "by the book" shouldn't be surprising. :)

As to the rest; my point was that Bertrand was very opposed to change in 'his'
code, not that he wasn't open to any change. Regarding malloc, I think
Bertrand still thought he'd be best suited to do it, and he has always
objected strenuously to others approaching his problems.

 _Oh, and as for top…when they did change it in early SnowLeopard builds, it
broke a whole host of tooling, etc., and they had to revert some changes..._

That's pretty normal when tools depend on text output of commands (something
Core OS has told everyone not to do, and then they do anyway). The initial
conversion to modern top/libtop actually occurred back in the 10.{1,2,3}
release cycles, and was subject to a very heavy amount of push-back and
compromise with Bertrand about "his" top(1) :)

~~~
jballanc
Oh, I never had a problem with Core OS's academic bent...enjoyed it actually.
I was more commenting about the unique sort of tension that existed there, and
that managing that tension while also developing kick-ass software is a
relatively impressive feat. Also, you're right about the "I can do it better
than anyone" attitude regarding fixing things that he wrote...but then my
experience was that this was a pervasive attitude at Apple. The only way you
could get someone to listen to you was to not only do it better but _prove_
that you had done it better. So, maybe that's not the best attitude for a
manager to take, but hardly out of the ordinary (for Apple).

I also feel that as time moved on, Bertrand was making more bad decisions, but
that this might have been a consequence of pressure from the top. It may not
look like it to the outside observer, but there is a major metamorphosis going
on at Apple internally. I think this move will be for the best for Bertrand.
As for Apple... * shrug *

...oh, and thanks for bringing back memories of the Core OS "you're doing it
wrong, stupid" lessons I got so familiar with. If only we could all be so
perfect as Core OS! ;-)

------
dcreemer
I will say this about Bertrand -- the guy works all the time. It's become a
running joke with my wife... Every single time we go out to dinner & coffee in
downtown Palo Alto, we wonder which coffee shop we'll see him in, working away
on his laptop.

------
npalli
Looks like lot of top level changes at apple. If rumors/reports are to be
believed, just this year --

1\. Steve Jobs out of action for a while

2\. Jonny Ive not wanting to extend his stay in the US and going back to
England

3\. Oppenheimer out, looking for a new CFO with deal making capabilities

4\. Bertrand Serlet out and an internet veteran taking his place

[2] [http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/27/ive-due-30m-stock-windfall-
ma...](http://www.tuaw.com/2011/02/27/ive-due-30m-stock-windfall-may-seek-
relocation-back-to-uk/)

[3] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-07/apple-s-overture-
to...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-07/apple-s-overture-to-
blackstone-s-cfo-may-signal-desire-for-more-dealmaking.html)

~~~
runjake
#2 may have been shot down by Apple this week. I'd assume if he were going to
leave Apple, they'd keep mum. Or maybe he was going to bail but they offered
him more money. Or offered to let him work from the UK.

Also: TUAW rivals the National Inquirer on reliability of their news. You
shouldn't cite them if you want your points taken seriously.

~~~
rimantas
Regarding #2 — when I first saw that rumor my thought was: where would he go?
My take is that Ive is in some kind of lock-in — nowhere else would he get the
culture, resources, help, anything he needs to be what he is.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
The Ive thing is / was apparently about wanting to move back the UK and have
his children educated here rather than work.

I'm guessing that he's set for life financially and that he'd basically have
his pick of jobs or freelance work so while it might not be Apple, he's going
to do fine.

But a recent newspaper article (it was the Daily Mail so I use the term
newspaper loosely) said he wasn't looking to move back here and there was no
truth to the rumour. No idea what their source but probably about as reliable
/ unreliable as the source of the original rumour which was pretty speculative
to say the least.

------
glhaynes
For those who've never seen him: a funny clip of Serlet dissing Vista at the
2006 developer conference:
<http://tumblr.frijole.info/post/4044018611/bertrand-wwdc-06>

~~~
nikster
Nice one! Ever since the port of Mac OS X to the iPhone - the iOS - I am in
awe of Apple engineering. They are Gods.

I mean - imagine Vista, or Win 7 going on the phone, just with a new touch UI
framework added. It simply wouldn't work, couldn't work, would be impossible,
beyond the reach of the richest software company in the world.

Sometimes, good engineering does pay off, and ultimately one could say that
iOS is a direct result of good engineering. Every time the iOS wins it's a win
for good design, and for object oriented programming.

That said, the dark side of being so far ahead of everyone for so long is a
severe case of NIH syndrome at Apple. Those times when others surprisingly
better Apple, Apple takes a very long time to catch up. Dev tools are the best
example with XCode 10 years behind Eclipse. MobileMe Mail is perhaps another
one: MobileMe Mail is similar to Mail.app on OS X - but Gmail is way better
than that, and has been pretty much from the beginning.

~~~
runjake
I'm not sure why you're getting upvoted. The NT base OS already runs on
embedded platforms with equal or lesser power than that of any of the iOS
platforms.

Are you trying to imply that the base OS is bloated? Or, are you trying to
imply that the UI frameworks are bloated?

Apple didn't just port Mac OS X to the iOS platform, they more accurately
ported the underlying Darwin OS to it, and added UIKit and other specialized
frameworks.

~~~
contextfree
I don't know much about Windows Embedded Standard (what Microsoft officially
calls its modular embeddable cut-down version of W7, also known as "MinWin")
vs. Windows CE, but Microsoft for whatever reason still chose to base Windows
Phone 7 on CE instead of Standard, indicating that they still don't think
Standard is appropriate for mobile devices. Probably they will port it to
Standard eventually, but they haven't yet.

~~~
jimbobimbo
MinWin is not a "cut-down version of W7" - it was never productized, only a
concept demo. Regardless though, Vista had started and W7 continued better
separation of layers in NT. Maybe Vista was a percieved disaster, it was a
necessary step nontheless.

~~~
runjake
Actually it is a cut-down version of W7. But you're still right, as "MinWin"
has meant different things inside Microsoft across each release:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minwin#Releases>

An interesting excerpt (iirc, Eric demoed this in a Channel 9 video):

 _In October 2007, Eric Traut, a developer at Microsoft, demonstrated a self-
contained MinWin system, made up of about 100 files, on which a basic HTTP
server was running.[10][11] Traut noted that MinWin takes up about 25 MB on
disk and has a working set (memory usage) of 40 MB. It lacked a graphical user
interface and is interfaced using a full-screen command line interface. Traut
explained during the demo that MinWin would not be offered as a stand-alone
product, but would instead be used as the basis for future operating system
releases such as Windows 7._

~~~
jimbobimbo
Yes, this demo what I'm referring to - there's no confirmation anywhere that
it was used anywhere yet.

------
glhaynes
Wil Shipley (longtime NeXT and Mac OS X programmer) posted a few thoughts on
Serlet and his replacement Federighi. Well worth a read, he clearly has
enormous respect for both of them.

[http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/03/celebrating-betrand-
serle...](http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/03/celebrating-betrand-serlet-and-
craig.html)

------
bambax
_Well it’s a sad day for all of us here in Cupertino. Bertrand Serlet, the
friendly cyborg from the future who has lived among us and helped guide our
software development efforts with such skill, has been recalled back to his
home planet. We’ll have a little announcement at town hall this Friday with a
cake and ice cream. Bertrand has been instrumental in guiding our OS X
development and now that Leopard is out the door Bertrand (real name: Belar)
felt this was a good time to heed the call of his people on Gallifrey One, who
need him to help fight off some invaders in the future or something.

[...]

Much love, Bertrand. O traveler of time, you have brought a vision of peace to
our galaxy, not to mention a great deal of truly sweet software. For your
countless contributions to our company and to our planet, we thank you._

From Fake Steeve Jobs, Nov. 2007

[http://www.fakesteve.net/2007/11/bertrand-serlet-recalled-
to...](http://www.fakesteve.net/2007/11/bertrand-serlet-recalled-to-his-
home.html)

------
moblivu
That's a great part of the business; ideas and people travels! Look at Matias
Duarte -the designer of WebOS- he moved to the Android team and made (made is
technically speaking) the Honeycomb we now know. Designers and coders moves
and makes the industry moving in a great way because it creates diversity and
changes!

------
wtn
They need to replace the Apple Developer Tools lead next. He's been at Apple
forever—around 30 years now—and he's gone insane.

The Xcode 4 interface should not imitate iTunes.

~~~
astrange
Do you mean Chris Espinosa? He isn't working on Xcode.

~~~
stevejohnson
And is definitely not insane.

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joeybaker
Not to take anything away from Bertrand and go back to the normal tea leaf
reading we so enjoy to do with Apple, but … here goes :]

Did anyone else notice how the press release was so heavily focused on Steve
Jobs? It could almost be read as: Jobs is at the helm, and don't worry, he'll
be okay.

------
sgt
Good to see that a NeXT guy is taking over from him. I wish Bertrand the best
of luck in his new ventures.

------
vertr
There's science to be done!

