Darwin (operating system)

Darwin is the core Unix-like operating system of macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, audioOS, visionOS, and bridgeOS.

[8][9][10] The heritage of Darwin began with Unix derivatives supplemented by aspects of NeXT's NeXTSTEP operating system (later, since version 4.0, known as OPENSTEP), first released in 1989.

[11] At the time, interim CEO Steve Jobs alluded to British naturalist Charles Darwin by announcing "because it's about evolution".

As of January 2023, Apple no longer mentions Darwin by name on its Open Source website and only publishes an incomplete collection of open-source projects relating to macOS and iOS.

Darwin does not include many of the defining elements of macOS, such as the Carbon and Cocoa APIs or the Quartz Compositor and Aqua user interface, and thus cannot run Mac applications.

It does, however, support a number of lesser-known features of macOS, such as mDNSResponder, which is the multicast DNS responder and a core component of the Bonjour networking technology, and launchd, an advanced service management framework.

Due to the free software nature of Darwin, there have been projects that aim to modify or enhance the operating system.

[42] PureDarwin is a project to create a bootable operating system image from Apple's released source code for Darwin.

[43] Since the halt of OpenDarwin and the release of bootable images since Darwin 8.x, it has been increasingly difficult to create a full operating system as many components became closed source.