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Comment by galad87 | Hacker News Reader

It's surely not perfect, and so much is quite horrible, but at least try to keep the facts in check. AppKit and auto layout are still working fine, they aren't going anywhere any time soon, there is no need to rewrite all the UI code.

Core Data threading? Well, it has got its pitfalls, but those are known, and anyway, nothing is forcing you to use it.

Xcode is so slim these days, it a ~3 GB download, it doesn't take an hour to unxip, and it can be dowloaded from the developer website.

Swift? It might be needed for a bunch of new frameworks, Objective-C isn't going anywhere anytime soon either.

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I wouldn't call Xcode slim. It currently sits at 13GB+ as installed on my drive, and that does not include the simulators which are, what, 10GB each or something? Xcode is by far the largest application I have installed on my "daily driver" Mac.

It's still compressed on disk, so it takes only 5,4 GB of space, not 13 GB+. Sure, the simulator and the iOS or the other SDKs will take more space, but those aren't needed to develop macOS apps.

Let's also keep in mind that the Linux desktop commits most of these offenses, but worse.

Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going?

Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption.

As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major upgrades; if you weren't using a framework, you needed to have fun learning the quirks of Xorg; nobody who builds for Linux gets to lecture Mac about UI stability.

Or, for that matter, app stability in general. Will a specific build of Blender outside of a Flatpak still work on the Linux desktop after 2 release cycles? No? Then don't lecture me about good practices. Don't lecture me about how my website or app was sloppily engineered because it has dependencies.

You seem to be conflating 2 different things. Apple’s OS proficiency and the associated technologies they support on their OS and Apple’s dev tools proficiency.

People use Apple’s dev tools because they are the only/best way to deliver apps on Apple’s OSes.

If we changed the situation, so that Apple Dev Tools could be used to create applications for non Apple OSes, or non Apple Dev tools were first class citizens for creating Apple apps, I bet the vast majority of people would use the non Apple dev tools to create both Apple and non Apple apps.

What’s keeping Apple Dev Tools in the game is their privileged position in the Apple OS ecosystem.

Why bring Linux up?

Are the target users for this likely to use Linux (rather than Windows) if the ditched Apple?

> Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption

Plenty of languages used on Linux. Why pick one that did not gain traction?

> f you weren't using a framework, you needed to have fun learning the quirks of Xorg;

Who does that?

> GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major upgrades

But they are cross platform.

> Will a specific build of Blender outside of a Flatpak still work on the Linux desktop after 2 release cycles?

Does that matter? Maybe a bit of extra work for packagers - and people can use Flatpack or Snap.

And the UI situation still has issues. If you want flexibility in language choice, GTK is the only modern-ish framework option there is. The rest are tied to 1-2 languages, bad at accessibility, look archaic, etc.

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