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A comment on Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel.

Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by thothamon on Monday April 02, 2018 @02:54PM (#16737939)
Well. We'll see what they do, but Apple had better be very careful. If a lot of OSS software won't run on Apple's new chip, then it becomes very hard for a software developer like myself to stick with Apple. And it is developer energy that sustains the software ecosystem for Apple....including many developers who are in the Mac ecosystem to develop for iOS.

This is not necessarily the wrong move for Apple, but it is fraught with danger. Here be dragons.

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by djrogers on Monday April 02, 2018 @04:05PM (#16738733)
Much of the OSS stuff people run on macs - like the stuff that's in brew - already runs on various ARM based platforms. That's why your little raspberry pi can run a 'real desktop'.
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by edude03 on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:29PM (#16738314)
OSS software can "just" be recompiled though.
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by thothamon on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:56PM (#16738645)
In theory yes, but back in the PPC days a lot of stuff was not available even though theoretically it could have been.
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by super_mario on Monday April 02, 2018 @07:17PM (#16740346)
This was complicated by the fact that PPC was big endian and Intel is little endian. If software assumed byte order when twiddling bits, etc, you could not just recompile it.
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by bitL on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:45PM (#16738518)
If iOS will be by that time the only mainstream way to make money from developing software (happening already), people would care very little about OSS there...
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by kccqzy on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:44PM (#16738504)
By definition, if the maintainer of some OSS software doesn't have the time/energy/willingness to make the software run on Apple's new chip, you can do it yourself.
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by thothamon on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:55PM (#16738637)
True, but right now I don't have to do it myself. Things like brew just work. If the proposal is to throw away something that works, and add the burden of doing it myself to my to-do list, that doesn't sound at all appealing.
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by kccqzy on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @08:09AM (#16743854)
Brew is maintained. If there is indeed an architectural switch, you would expect Brew to be one of the first projects to actively embrace it and make things just work.
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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by wintercharm on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @01:04AM (#16742045)
Keep in mind that Apple has a veritable army of ARM developers (thanks to the iOS app store) which

1. doesn't suck 2. pays very well 3. has already demonstrated multiplatform apps with iPad / iPhone

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by netheril96 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @04:17AM (#16742759)
But unless the software has embedded assembly, most likely you can just recompile it and run it fine. Even easier if it is written in languages other than C/C++.
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