HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silicon Macs

Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic... by fragmede on Sunday December 25, 2022 @02:13PM (#34130158)

It depends on what you use on their respective OSes. If you use your MacBook as an expensive Chrome/Slack/Netflix machine, I'd agree it's straight forwards to upgrade macOS. However there is a large range of very expensive professional apps that are pretty much guaranteed not to work on major version updates before the vendor also releases an upgrade, if they ever do. Avid for example. Or Ableton. There's a huge library of 32-bit x86 VST plugins that are now locked away from newer macOS versions due to it dropping 32-bit support.

A lot of hardware didn't get new drivers either, and macOS went and changed that around a few versions back. These are professional products, with many thousands of dollars invested into them, so the upgrade cost is often impossibly high. Hell, I forget the name of the movie, but it was cut on a version of Final Cut Pro (not X) that was five years old when the movie was cut. That editor held onto that their ancient un-upgradeable machine for dear life because that was the workflow they lived and breathed.

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Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic... by my123 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @02:26PM (#34130308)

For 32-bit, interestingly Apple still maintains a very bare minimum (_not_ covering Mac GUI apps).

This has two customers today:

- on x86 Macs only: older iOS Simulators

- on x86 and arm64 Macs: x86_32 code segments (no syscall emu), for Wine to be able to run 32-bit x86 applications.

I think that the fragile base class problem might be what made Apple get rid of 32-bit x86 app compatibility at the end.

> A lot of hardware didn't get new drivers either, and macOS went and changed that around too

Yeah. KM drivers aren't exactly the most stable thing from release to release ever on macOS. And Apple has been steadily getting rid of those.

The player that actually cares the most about backwards compatibility on the desktop to an insane extent is Microsoft. 32-bit Windows editions (that are able to run 16-bit apps) are only gone in Windows 11. Apple still spends a lot of effort on it but not to the same extent at all.

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Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic... by kitsunesoba on Sunday December 25, 2022 @02:54PM (#34130605)

Windows is better than average but still has considerable holes in backwards compatibility that are particularly visible in games (and ironically, some of the worst are Microsoft's own games under the "Games for Windows" banner e.g. Fable 3), but I've seen a number of other random things break or stop working totally as expected when new versions of Windows come out.

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Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic... by lokar on Sunday December 25, 2022 @02:43PM (#34130459)

I’m not sure it’s fair to cite breaks due to hardware arch changes as evidence that the OS is bad at backwards compatibility. If anything apple has been better then average for compatibility across hw platforms, offering translation

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Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic... by fragmede on Sunday December 25, 2022 @03:21PM (#34130852)

The breaks I mentioned are just whilst on Intel though. The change to Apple Silicon assuredly broke an ton of stuff but I'm not even counting those.

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Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic... by duped on Sunday December 25, 2022 @08:20PM (#34133485)

DAW developers have historically advised users not to upgrade MacOS versions until it is explicitly supported and professionals in the space resist updates at all costs.

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Re:HelloSilicon – An introduction to assembly on Apple Silic... by KerrAvon on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:55PM (#34134059)

This is the only reasonable advice for any OS — DAWs are business-critical and every project is severely time-sensitive and you cannot rely on software vendors at any level of the stack to not break something.

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