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 eptcyka on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @06:47AM (#16743399)

Now, take this with a grain of salt, as I'm no open source maintainer, and I only rarely use Windows, and even then for development. Up until very recently, to get real developer tools that are supported by Microsoft one had to buy visual studio. VS2017 has a community edition that's usable for open source projects.

Not to mention, the windows environment is completely different to linux and OSX. Until x64, they had a different calling convention. On OSX and linux, also until recently, I could use the same compiler for both platforms and still be supported by the platform vendor.

All of these non-trivial differences make it a lot more resource-intensive to support a codebase on windows that already runs on Linux and OSX. Asides from my work VMs, I don't even have a windows device that I could use for development. So to me, it's no surprise that most open source projects don't build on Windows.

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by dep_b on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @08:08AM (#16743851)

Community Edition is really nice nowadays, usable for day-to-day professional usage as well. If ReSharper works - it works for me.

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by pjmlp on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @09:15AM (#16744292)

Student and hobby editions of Visual Studio exist for decades, before they introduced Community, there was the Express editions.

Also, mingw and cygwin also exist since late 90's.

OS X tools are kind of included on Apple's hardware price.

Apple hardware costs in many countries is similar to average PC + VS License costs.

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by eptcyka on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @10:04AM (#16744666)

Whilst I agree with you on all but mingw and cygwin, these tools are wildly different. Integrating microsoft's C/C++ toolchain into an existing makefile would be hell. And again, most people who have a mac don't have to buy the compiler. Most people don't buy extra software after the fact just to compile open source libraries. I can't imagine a reason to buy visual studio for personal use, and I can't imagine a reason as to why I'd dick around with visual studio in my free time.

As for mingq and cygwin, most regular people don't have it installed and configured. And cygwin and mingw are not _platforms_ which receive first party support, as unfortunate as that might be.

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by jcadam on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:50AM (#16745835)

I once had to use cygwin to port an old C library from UNIX (I don't recall the flavor of UNIX) to windows. It involved editing makefiles to use the MSVC toolchain, amongst many other things.

It was pure pain. Especially when the boss kept asking me what was taking so long (it's just a recompile right?).

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by pjmlp on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @12:12PM (#16746122)

People that have a Mac already payed for the compiler.

500 € PC + Visual Studio vs 1000 € Mac.

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Re:Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Repla... by eptcyka on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @05:48AM (#16753320)

I don't believe that the majority of people who buy 500€ PCs would spend money on Visual Studio. In the Mac case, nobody pays for the compiler because Clang is open source - this is a massive oversimplification, but whilst the fact that Clang and Make are distributed in the standard OSX base install is a value add in my book, I don't believe that it's something that people pay for. Also, the people who buy Apple hardware are a completely different set of customers to those who buy 500€ PCs. However, this is all a bit moot as you and many others have pointed out that the community edition is out there and it is usable.

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