How will Apple's move to Arm change web development?

6 points·shams93··4 comments

How do you think Apple's move to arm will change web today's standard web development workflow?

I don’t think a hypothetical move to ARM will change much for web development. Most of our tools are in interpreted languages (as well as the languages we develop in - JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc) and interpreters are available for ARM already.

I would be more concerned for designers and creatives who need software like Sketch, Photoshop, After Effects, etc.

Well it might change the tools you use on the Apple platforms, as Intel specific stuff will deprecate. And some tools will be optimized for it, whenever that happens (having been around for the 68k->PPC and PPC->Intel changes) you will probably see some of your favorite programs either become useless on new systems or a rewrite that isn't quite in the spirit of the older versions (new dev team, new ideas/priorities, maybe not as savvy on some of the features that were in the older versions) Ive seen a lot of good software/features left on the wayside during those transitions, theres been some welcome advances too but I fondly remember what was possible but no more.

Yup, basically this. If you rely on open source tools, especially packages that are primarily developed for Linux but packaged for Mac via Homebrew, you'll probably want to wait 18 months to switch to an ARM device for development, because it'll take that long for >80% of the maintainers to catch up.

It is not certain that Apply will change its Mac completely to the ARM architecture any time soon. But even if it did I would expect that developer related applications will run as they do today and web development workflow will not change.

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