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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Making a toolchain for iPadOS is trivial. The issue is that Apple does not provide the facilities to do this.

Porting the toolchain is arguably trivial, but making a pleasant developer experience on a computing platform that may or may not have a keyboard is another concern entirely.

Making a pleasant developer experience is a lot easier than getting iPad to load your compiled code at the moment, and the current state of developer tools reflects this.

I see, your gripe is having to be a part of the Apple developer program to develop for iOS. A 10+ years stale debate.

No, my issue is with the fact that even with a developer program account you cannot compile and run code directly on your device.

This is news to me as an iOS developer. I wonder what I’ve been doing all this time.

Compiling code on your computer and then transferring it to your device?

Sure you can. With a developer account nothing is stopping you from running a compiler on your device. You don’t need root or jailbreak to run a compiler.

As other poster alluded to. It’s not the difficulty, it’s that given the environment of the iPad, there isn’t a compelling use case.

> Sure you can. With a developer account nothing is stopping you from running a compiler on your device. You don’t need root or jailbreak to run a compiler.

You can run a compiler, but you cannot run the generated code.

Easier for everyone other than Apple itself. But GP was suggesting that Apple build it, and Apple can easily modify their own code signing restrictions.

I took the comment to mean that developers should bootstrap it. Perhaps I misinterpreted it…

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