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Comment by sitharus | Hacker News Reader

Since last year Apple have allowed executing user-input code providing the application is designed for teaching programming, https://twitter.com/palmin/status/871980560943636480 has a summary. I can't link to the actual doc since that's behind a login.

I'm not sure how this app would be allowed though.

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Pythonista has been on the App Store for 6 years. The first programming environment on the iPad I ever used was Codea which is based on Lua which was released in 2011, but there are many more. Genuine programming environments directly hosted on iOS have been around for a long time.

The main restriction in the past was on apps that downloaded code to run. For Pythonista and Codea and such this meant you had to either type in or cut-and-past in your code. However Pythonista has had the ability for you to write or paste in a dropbox sync script or FTP server script, etc, for may years, they just couldn't include it as standard. Since then this has been eased up so Pythonista now has a built-in feature to sync scripts to iCloud.

You can get a lot past the TestFlight review, which seems to be automated now. Probably just checks for API abuse and whatnot.

Getting to App Store is a human review.

I make the argument that this application downloads and emulates code that is user-editable in the form of x86 binaries, which is the same as Pythonista or similar downloading and running Python code.

I like that argument. I wonder if Apple will.

Well, it's on TestFlight already, so it's already passed one round of Apple's screening.

I don't think that was a very deep look at the app, especially since you have to know how to use a Linux prompt to understand that this app is an emulator.

> I don't think that was a very deep look at the app

I doubt it was, but my headcanon is that some poor App Store reviewer saw something that looked like code and grabbed a supervisor to do a deeper review.

I haven’t heard the term headcanon before.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Headcanon

An idea, belief, or aspect of a story that is not mentioned in the media itself, but is accepted by either the media consumer themselves or the fandom in general. If it is confirmed by the creator of the story, it becomes canon.

It's a quite popular term, but only within media fandoms. So if you don't fancy searching for clues in each single frame of a new episode of $TV_SHOW and arguing with strangers on the internet about how to interpret the exact wording in that dialogue, you probably haven't come across it yet.

TestFlight builds to my knowledge only have to pass the automated scan. As such, as long as the dev isn’t using private APIs or doing other forbidden things that can be statically scanned for, it’ll get past that point.

I would think Apple themselves are looking into this (probably on the processor level as they control that now) for iOS; in order to make it more free for devs / users while having software run securely sandboxed, they need a way of running 'anything' securely. So I don't think they mind users testing out different ways of making it work and learn from it.

Does that processor have hardware support for it already but Apple just doesn't do software support? So they can only use it themselves?

Sorry, I don't quite understand your question. Are you asking whether Apple has put support in their processors for running arbitrary code inside a sandbox?

They are asking if the A series Apple chips have virtualisation features like Intel VT-x

I think they do, at least recent ones should. I don't think Apple has explicitly documented this anywhere, but I recall reading something like this recently.

That's a pretty arbitrary exception especially when Apple wants us to believe that iPads have made "computers" obsolete.

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