Apple is doing this, because Swift is their next-gen systems programming language.
Swift supports static linking just fine as well.
Really, it is all a matter of which demographics Rust wants to be present.
And with Rust now being adopted by Microsoft and Google, I just see this need only increasing.
It just looks like everything is source code when not taking the effort to read through all dependencies.
It doesn't force companies at all, only those that are comfortable shipping source libraries end up adopting such languages.
I used to work for a company that shipped encrypted Tcl source code and provided the necessary interpreter hooks to access the code in its encrypted form.
Yes, and the others are left behind and don't get to participate in (and infect) the ecosystem. Sounds like a win to me.
> I used to work for a company that shipped encrypted Tcl source code and provided the necessary interpreter hooks to access the code in its encrypted form.
Surely.. if the interpreter can decrypt the code then so can the user? Minification and obfuscation are of course still possible, but the whole encryption thing seems pointless.
Apple also relies heavily on dynamic linking in general, so binary dependencies are likely going to dynamically link their own dependencies, thus removing a lot of the variability that would otherwise require recompilation.