C++ is widely used by the Apple OS teams, but they don't expose C++ APIs directly.

A lot of the plain-C APIs with a CoreFoundation style interface are actually C++ underneath. (No insider information necessary, this is easy to see in stack traces and process call stack samples.)

I concur. When I was there, they were pretty clear that everything I made belonged to Apple (which was total bullshit according to California law), that nothing we made would ever be open sourced due to patent issues, and that I was to never say anything about the company in public.

I wonder how their team could swing that culture without tripping over legal at every turn.

Isn't WebKit based on KDE's KHTML?

Back in 2001, Apple forked KHTML and used it to create WebKit. Some parts have been backported to KHTML but the projects diverged a decade ago.

> and that I was to never say anything about the company > in public.

This remains the case to a large extent. This makes working with Apple and Microsoft in standards groups a bit challenging at times, since they won't actually comment on whether they're even thinking about implementing a standard, or whether they would be willing to implement it as written, until they suddenly ship it.

And if they're _not_ shipping it you have no way to tell whether that's because they never will because of some fundamental issue they perceive or whether they're basically fine with the idea bu just haven't gotten around to finding resources to implement yet.

In the case of Web standards in particular, you can usually see the checkins in our public source tree well before we ship it. But per policy we will rarely publicly commit to shipping something or not ahead of time.

Historically, the story with visibility on checkins to iOS Safari was not that great.

But yes, for desktop Safari usually one can get some idea by scouring checkin logs.

Agreed. Apple's involvement with BluRay in particular was pretty hilarious.

If Apple could have developed their own proprietary rendering engine they would have. Jumping on KHTML meant they could get a working, OS X UI compliant browser when IE for OS X was no longer being maintained, even if the guts of that app had to be shared with others.

While that's true for the LGPL components of WebKit, they were under no obligation to open source the BSD components, which they largely wrote.

> C++ - a language not even particularly widely used elsewhere in Apple.

Isn't this why Objective-C++ is a thing?