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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

You can be "cross-platform" in many ways. In practice if you don't run MacOS yourself, there's just no reasonable way to support MacOS at all. It literally costs hundreds of dollars to get a compatible test environment, while most other systems (including Windows) you can download and run a in VM for free.

In practice if the MacOS support takes more than a quick headers / types update, it will likely need more care in the future as well. That means you need not just a driveby fix, but a continued commitment from someone to ensure compatibility. This is not out of hostility towards the users, but I'll keep calling things that don't work on MacOS cross-platform. (Yes, it sucks; You can vote with your money to stop that situation)

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> It literally costs hundreds of dollars to get a compatible test environment, while most other systems (including Windows) you can download and run a in VM for free.

Not even that; I've developed for Windows using Wine plus a mingw cross-compiler packaged by the Linux distribution I was using. Another alternative would be ReactOS in a VM.

agreed, as a developer i don't need an android device to test, just open a simulator and most things will work. on the other hand you cant even compile for ios with a linux/windows pc.

You can put OS X in a Windows or Linux hosted hypervisor, but the Apple doesn't want you to know about it.

You can, but it's illegal. You're only allowed to virtualise MacOS on MacOS host. You also have to obtain the system which as far as I can tell you can't buy anymore - you can only upgrade to.

Just because something is unauthorized or breaks EULA (mostly void here in EU anyway) doesn't mean it's illegal.

Even if you don't expect EULA to be enforced (will you pay for my lawyers/fine if it is?), you still need a copy of the system which you can't buy directly. You're left with unauthorised copies if you don't have any MacOS hardware and the same question - would you cover my legal costs?

You can download MacOS directly from Apple for free.

How do you legally download Big Sur without having an existing Mac machine? I thought that option was gone for some time now. A quick search doesn't bring up good solutions.

On the flip side, why would it be legal? It's looks like a pretty cut case of copyright infringement. It's their software, you're not authorized to use it, but you're using it anyways.

First it's illegal but secondly the performance is atrocious anyways (at least last time I've tried) so it won't even help you that much.

Hackintoshes break the TOS last time I checked.

Some stuff can be built for Macs from Linux, stuff like the Godot game engine supports this.

It is however a guess if they're going to allow that build or not.

Godot doesn’t build Mac binaries on Linux, the export templates provided include the platform native binaries.

> In practice if you don't run MacOS yourself, there's just no reasonable way to support MacOS at all.

I think this is the key insight. I tried to do a similar thing with Windows. The free VM expired every 30 days or so and bootstrapping a build environment each time (even just downloading it) sucked. The build environment is an outlier compared to macOS/Linux/Unix. I eventually ended up paying for Windows. I still couldn't test things like OpenGL inside a VM.

> while most other systems (including Windows) you can download and run a in VM for free.

For what it's worth there are many "click and run" virtual machine creators for OS X. It's not acceptable for corporate use because of the license violations, but to be honest I see very little issue for open source developers using such a solution if they don't have a Mac.

The problem is that you're not a reviewer at apple, or an apple lawyer...

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