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Comment by fluxem | Hacker News Reader

But linux can be run on arm natively. Moreover, most packages are also compiled for arm. So apt-get install will work just the same. I'm sure they will be able to target Apple's specific arm chips when they come out.

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Apple released a list of open source projects that they have ported to ARM, they intend to upload patches to each of these projects:

  - Bgfx
  - Blender
  - Boost
  - Skia
  - Zlib-Ng
  - Chromium
  - cmake
  - Electron
  - FFmpeg
  - Halide
  - Swift Shader
  - Homebrew
  - MacPorts
  - Mono
  - nginx
  - map
  - Node
  - OpenCV
  - OpenEXR
  - OpenJDK
  - SSE2Neon
  - Pixar USD
  - Qt
  - Python 3
  - Redis
  - Cineform CFHD
  - NumPy
  - Go
  - V8

Great to see Homebrew and MacPorts on that list. That's a huge signal that Apple plans on supporting developer / tinkerer use cases.

Apple engineers have to install packages too :)

I feel like the ARM transition is why MacOS hasn't progressed much (IMHO) in the past 2 or 3 years. It was a common assumption around here that they were diverting all their top resources to iOS/iPadOS development.

The reality seems to be that their top MacOS developers have been busy laying groundwork for the ARM transition. There's so much to be done.

Most of those were already ported into ARM Linux/BSD several years ago.

I'm curious to see the Google projects that have patches from Apple, since all of those run on Android which is for all intents and purposes ARM.

I'm guessing new ARMv8 ISA features, PAC/BTI/MTE?

Yes, ARM Mac will make fully use of ARM security and hardware mitigations against typical C exploits, there are a couple of WWDC talks about it.

Interesting - would you mind sharing a link?

Has anyone seen those patches start to land? Just curious what the timelines on those are.

It’s interesting that Electron is on that list.

It's also interesting that this won't fix old Electron applications. The idea of easy cross platform development via Electron is a myth because most developers won't support your platform even if all support requires is checking a box. When you consider that this is the primary justification for using Electron over other stacks it just makes your blood boil. All the downsides with none of the benefits.

Crucial piece of tech for many products like VSCode, Slack, Discord, etc.

Given how much Microsoft's React Native team bashes Electron with their performance bar charts (300x more bloat than RN), I look forward that, as soon as it is mature across Linux, macOS and Windows, they replace Electron with RN on VSCode.

Makes sense; port Electron and you get a bunch of apps for free.

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