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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

Docker and Linux virtualization. Fat binaries to make it easy to update Mac apps. iPhone and iPad apps. Rosetta to run Intel apps that aren’t updated.

Apple is gonna knock this out if the park.

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There's gonna be a weird moment soon where developing docker images for Armbian hardware (Pi and friends) is going to be more straightforward on a Mac than developing docker images for Intel servers.

And that may be the moment that ARM servers start picking up steam.

I wonder what sort of involvement ARM server vendors could be offering during this period. I don't expect Apple 'needs' anything from them, but there might be some Docker work they could be jumping on.

I wonder what this will do to Electron. If the iOS apps are really 1:1 on macOS, then the need to maintain an electron app will probably diminish. As long as they both support the same OS APIs I can see devs that can learn a new language (Swift) ditch Electron.

Isn't this already the case?

iOS apps can be built, for Intel, using Catalyst, with very trivial changes in code, but we still see Electron hanging around today like a bad smell.

I can't imagine this will change anything.

But have you actually used a Catalyst app on mac? They're terrible ports as it is right now.

As bad as Electron? I think not.

Eh, Catalyst apps are as good or bad as the developer wants them to be. Voice Memos and "Find My" on the Mac are two fantastic Catalyst apps, and certainly better than Electron.

Anyways Catalyst won't even be relevant in the long term, once iPhone apps are written in SwiftUI

Interestingly there's a few mentions of Catalyst improvements in the Xcode 12 release notes:

> When bringing iPad apps to macOS, you can now use the Optimize Interface for Mac target setting to use native macOS controls and Mac resolution

Hopefully this means Catalyst apps will feel a little more like actual Mac apps.

I often close the Twitter app and Apple's news and stock apps on my Mac mini because the performance is terrible. Hoping they've spent time tuning this more.

Catalyst and SwiftUI are (were?) very immature technologies, not yet ideal for production software. I'd imagine that we're at least a year out from seeing real SwiftUI software in the wild.

Mac and iOS aren't the only two platforms.

But if you're developing with Electron, the purpose is typically cross platform desktop support. This won't change that?

I'd wager for a significant amount of shops it's less about cross-platform support and more for being able to throw existing generalist or web frontend developers into native development. If a business wants to ship a desktop app quickly, it's hard to argue against electron because your existing teams can become productive without too much training.

Hrmn. Wouldn't this be leaving out android and windows? It might be practical for some apps, but that's an awful lot of users.

Electron already has support for ARM64, but no official releases yet. But it needs to be build from x86 machine. No native compilation on ARM64 yet. I think with apple moving to ARM, google will add native ARM64 compilation for chromium. This in turn will be picked by electron. Chromium has been running on ARM for a long time with Android and Chrome OS so it has all the optimizations.

Is there anyone building on Electron and only targeting the Mac desktop environment? Windows is still the king there.

Is MS Teams for Windows written with Electron? It is on Mac.

Yes it's Electron.

Apple had a list at the State of the Union of open source technology projects they had built pull requests for to add ARM support. Electron was up there, as was Python 3, OpenJDK and Go, notably.

Would love a link to that if you still have it on hand.

The processor architecture is not that relevant if you are working at the abstraction level that electron or swift-ui or similar provides.

I am soo much looking forward to using native Slack and Teams instead of their horrendous electron apps, that even don't use GPU acceleration on iGPU Macbooks!

It already has. I'll Def try to get my hands on the A12Z Mac Mini. The GPU performance should be vastly better than existing Mac Mini options.

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