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Comment by nasretdinov | Hacker News Reader

In iOS we can only use something like ish.app which emulates x86 and runs full Linux distro instead, with predictably much lower performance than Termux (due to JIT being banned in iOS apps), but without any restrictions Android has on the executables

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iSH is great as an ssh client. It has a good font out of the box, so it displays tmux and neovim properly.

a-Shell should be faster than iSH for local stuff since the tools are compiled natively, but nothing on iOS, as far as I know, compares to Termux on Android.

a-Shell looks amazing, thanks for mentioning it

Why does Apple ban JIT? It clearly doesn't ban emulation inherently, so why is emulation OK but not JIT?

I believe it's a ban on executing any runtime-generated or downloaded machine code, not just JIT in particular.

Probably ban on any unsigned code tbh

Then how is iSH allowed on the app store?

Elsewhere in this thread, someone mentioned that ISH is a full PC emulator running Alpine. You wouldn't necessarily need JIT or native execution for a software VM.

I don't have an iPhone, but wouldn't UTM be better for that use case?

UTM can't be installed from the App Store unfortunately, and without a developer license you are limited to 7 days for each successful on-device reinstall

Apple somewhat lifted the emulator restrictions on the App Store which means you can install UTM from here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-se-retro-pc-emulator/id156...

Nice, I must've missed that. Downloading it right away :)

Edit: well, it's also very slow unfortunately. I believe iPhone CPUs either don't support virtualisation or they don't expose it (edit #2: it's the latter). Either way, QEMU is struggling quite a bit, and due to it being a GUI it's even slower than what iSH could do

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