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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

What is day one of ARM-based MacBook ownership going to be like for a software developer?

Do we open Terminal and go to `brew install` a bunch of development tools... and then it hits us... this machine is cool and all, but half the stuff we need to get work done does not build or run on arm64?

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Homebrew lead maintainer here: if Apple release officially supported ARM hardware with Xcode: we will be trying to make Homebrew work well on it as soon as possible.

Cool news... aside, thank you for all your work on Homebrew, it cannot be understated how much you've helped so many developers and ops people.

Pretty sure you managed to understate it.

Surely homebrew will just extend to support building for ARM. For some packages that will “just work”, others will require some upgrades, but that’s already the case for OS upgrades now. Homebrew operate build servers to keep cached builds, I’m sure they can do the same for both ARM and x86.

It would be a big job, but much of the software on Homebrew is already ARM compatible, and I think there’s a clear path to supporting that, which should make the migration relatively seamless for most developers I’d imagine.

It won’t be without issue, but I don’t think it will hurt macOS as a development OS much in the long run.

What tools don't work on ARM? If you install Raspbian or ArchLinux ARM all the usual tools are available.

I may not be a device for Software Developers on day one. I guess Xcode will obviously work, and the default tools such as Python or Ruby. But for everything else it will take porting time, and that's fine because the target market will be casual users looking for a sub-799 Macbook.

Apple has done this before for PowerPC software on Intel hardware and Microsoft is doing it right now for Intel software on ARM hardware: Compatibility modes (or how you'd call it - they enable the software to run without modification, albeit at lowered performance).

When Apple did the PowerPC -> Intel switch, they were going to a higher performing CPU, so the efficiency loss in having to emulate was somewhat offset by the higher performance processor. In this case, they will most likely be taking a step down in performance, compounding the loss of efficiency in having to emulate.

Yet Apple has enough ecosystem power to force most developers to switch quickly. And if they don't the worst customer complaint will be the app running slowly. But I'd expect them to release a tool chain months before they start selling an ARM mac.

Plus, the Mac App Store makes this a lot easier this time round. Apple will have a big "optimized for Air" sticker on the App. 99% of common apps will switch in no time.

Also a reminder that NeXT had this years ago. It’s just nice to see all this stuff coming back.

I think the dev tooling will migrate fine... I think the creative tools for video editing/encoding etc will suffer to a level that cannot really be understated.

Maybe Adobe will finally take Linux seriously if that happens.

Build stuff from source? What’s the issue with that?

Brew being a set of ports as opposed to binary compatible is going to hurt Apple developers here. To compare, at Build 2018 I played with Windows Subsystem for Linux on an ARM64 Windows laptop. WSL being binary compatible meant all of the Ubuntu (or Debian, or …) packages for ARM64 were available.

What do you mean by “ports”? Homebrew builds stuff from source, like you always do on Unices.

Ports as in they are not using upstream binaries. I think I'm using the term ports correctly - like FreeBSD ports? That is, they may use the upstream source code (or not - I doubt that's true of all Homebrew packages) but they are not the native packages from an upstream *nix distribution.

I may have also spoken imprecisely. Ultimately what I mean is this: I can copy a binary or a package compiled for Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, what-have-you, targeting the Linux kernel, and I can run or install that in Windows Subsystem for Linux as is.

Here is the sources.list from Ubuntu 18.04 on Windows, with comments removed:

    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic main restricted

    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-updates main restricted

    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic universe
    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-updates universe

    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic multiverse
    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-updates multiverse

    deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-backports main restricted universe multiverse


    deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-security main restricted
    deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-security universe
    deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-security multiverse

No special sauce. Just Ubuntu packages.

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