I guess they kept it secret because no-one has a 64-bit embedded cpu.

It seems obvious that they kept it secret because if Apple had been pushing out improvements to the ARM64 code generator for the past months, someone would have connected the dots and understood they were building an ARM64 device.

All Chris Lattner's message is saying is that Apple's contributions here are subject to the same process as anyone else, namely incremental commits with community review.

>It seems obvious that they kept it secret because if Apple had been pushing out improvements to the ARM64 code generator for the past months, someone would have connected the dots and understood they were building an ARM64 device.

Existing high end mobile devices have on the order of 2GB of memory. It doesn't take a genius to work out that they're soon going to have 4GB or more and hit the ceiling of a 32-bit address space. Why bother keeping a secret something the entire market already knows is going to happen in short order?

Because the timing between "when that information comes out" and "when apple have something to show that people can buy" greatly affects their stock price.

What they might have done instead is reached out to the core team and let them in on it up front. Now it's going to be one huge code review after they commit their changes.

We don't know that they didn't; it takes about 5 seconds of 'git log lib/Target/AArch64' to see that it hasn't exactly been wild with activity this summer.

Again, the point of the message is that it isn't going to be 'one huge code review', it's going to be incremental small reviews, same as anyone else's contributions.

I have plenty of gripes with Apple (half of which can be inferred from the fact I'm personally running 10.6.8 for the foreseeable future) but this isn't one of them.