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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

why do commercial software vendors even have a delay with this kind of thing? I would assume software written in C which isn't doing any dark magic with opcodes can normally just be compiled to the new platform without any major hurdles? or is there some kind of "dropbox has to pay Apple huge license fee for X" kind of thing going on ?

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Some potential answers:

* Original programmer has since moved on, and as per industry standard there was no hand-off and code is poorly documented

* The team in charge of this is busy delivering features/fixing bugs for whale clients

* The product organisation down prioritizes it because the PM wants to build a shiny thing that gets them promoted

The short, simple answer is that pretty much every successful business has a combination of a shortage of technical resources and a priority list of things that matter to their customers. Some initiatives just don't get top priority at a given point in time. I can totally see why Dropbox might not prioritize this work right now because as of this moment, the client works as-is on M1 Macs.

Dependencies also are not migrated instantly or abandoned and they don't compile cleanly on new architecture.

Especially closed source tracking libraries from all over.

They may be considering whether they should have separate downloads or a smart installer/runtime that figures out what to install/run for MacOS. Separate downloads would be close(ish) to what you're describing, but would drive support issues for some users. A smart installer would be new code, maybe.

The simple fact is that, unsurprisingly, a lot of devs don't care. Apple can lead a horse to water, but they ultimately can't make them drink. By chasing such a radical paradigm shift with their new computers, there are inevitably going to be developers who get thrown under the bus without chance for recourse. Look at Valve's Proton project, which was intended to support MacOS just as well as Linux for near-perfect translation of DirectX games. When they started transitioning to ARM, they threw away so many system-side libraries and OS interfaces that Valve simply had to scrap the version altogether, since the amount of work required to get it working on Mac would be astronomically higher than the effort it takes to maintain it on Linux.

I'm trying to remain impartial here, but so long as the majority of the desktop market share stays on x86, there won't really be much financial incentive for developers to port things to ARM. We had the same issue a decade ago when the Raspberry Pi hit markets, with hardly enough software to get it running desktop Linux. Fast forward to today, and people still don't really care all that much.

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