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Comment by Tagbert | Hacker News Reader

They will probably not need that. Most apps should be able to be recompiled for Arm with no changes. Only a small number of apps (some audio pipeline apps for instance) are written so close to the metal that the processor change will require more work.

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But there are lots of apps that aren't actively maintained, and so will never get recompiled, even if they could be. And even the ones that are actively maintained might not be ready and recompiled on day 1. Emulation would go a long way to make the transition less painful.

Bitcode[1] would’ve been a good way to handle that, if Apple had ever supported it for Mac apps in addition to their other platforms.

1. https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/06/17/apples-biggest-devel...

I don’t see how that helps apps not in the App Store, as bitcode need to changed to a platform specific type .... unless this was done on the fly on the host platform.

Apart from a return of the dreaded Win-style endless installer progress bar surely doing it on the host, once, wouldn't be a problem. The "issue" would be squaring the result with notarization and bundle integrity, but that solves itself since it means Apple is already sitting on the (in this case bitcode) app whether it's in store or not.

But they'd probably use it as an incentive to drive stuff further towards the app store.

The bitcode is basically just LLVM IR, is it not? And that encodes plenty of platform-specific behaviours. Though with both being little-endian and both LP64 maybe there's less of an issue there?

https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2011-October/04372... is still my go-to pointer for the portability of LLVM IR (and bitcode); I don't know how Apple have dealt with the instability between LLVM releases of bitcode, but there's certainly plenty of potentially shortcomings if you want to compile for a different architecture.

Apple is not Microsoft, if you don’t maintain your software you’re left behind.

It's not a problem for devs so much as users. If I'm not maintaining my software it's probably because I can't afford it, but the people that use it still want it installed.

I agree with the sentiment, but I feel as though 75% of the unmaintained stuff already got killed in Catalina.

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