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Comment by RestartKernel | Hacker News Reader

This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.

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Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

Anything being developed for the Apple ecosystem requires use of the Apple development platform. Maybe the scope could be called "unserious," but the scale cannot be ignored.

I am aware.

However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.

It is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.

Making software for other Apple products pretty low on the reasons I use a MBP.

128GB of RAM and an M4 Max makes for a very solid development machine, and the build quality is a nice bonus.

An artificial limit on the number vms you are allowed to launch doesn't make it solid

macOS* VMs. And if you don’t care about that, is it no longer solid?

For me at least, not being Linux is a feature. Linux has always been “almost Unix” to the point where now it has become its own thing for better or worse. OS X was never trying to be Linux. It would be better if we still had a few more commercial POSIX implementations.

That is fair but in my experience most devs are targeting linux servers not BSD(or any other flavour) which is helped by OSX. If OSX was linux derived it would suit them just as well.

edit: I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.

> I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.

Point taken. Most developers probably make do with Linux containers rather than MacOS VMs.

Heterogeneity is the feature. The Linux ecosystem is better off for it (systemd, Wayland, dconf, epoll, inotify are all based on ideas that were in OS X first) and not being beholden to Linux is a competitive advantage for Apple everyone wins.

There is no reality that macOS could be based on Linux.

Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.

> Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.

This is also my opinion of OSX, let's not pretend that the userland mess is the most beautiful part of OSX.

Apple has great kernel and driver engineering for sure but once you go the stack above, it's ducktape upon ducktape and you better not upgrade your OS too quickly before they fix the next pile they've just added.

At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.

So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.

I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.

The hardware for a Linux laptop right now is not great. Especially for an arm64 machine. Even if the hardware is good the chassis and everything else is typically plastic and shitty.

That is a surprising sentiment. Most dell and Lenovo laptops work just fine and are usually of reasonably good build quality (non-plastic chassis etc.).

arm64 is however mostly bad. The only real contender for Linux laptops (outside of asahi) was Snapdragon's chips but the HW support there was lacking iirc.

They give us Dell Linux machines from work. They suck so bad and we have so many problems. Overheating, camera is terrible, performance is bad relatively to the huge weight of the device. Everything is a huge step down from Macs.

Whenever I see Linux people comparing Linux and Mac I'm amazed at the audacity. They are not in the same league. Not by a mile. Even the CLI is more convenient on the Mac which is truly amazing to me.

Prefer my Konsole setup on KDE and I use both interchangeably all day tbh. Camera yea. The irony is heating issues become less of an issue with arm.

We are lucky in that we can choose our machines (within reason, and no real support if things get broken) and run an arch flavour.

I use thinkpad x1 carbons and have nearly 0 issues. The hardware is not quite as nice as a macbook but it does the job and is nice enough.

How is the Mac CLI more convenient? There isn't even a package manager in the box, they ship loads of old outdated tools too. Plus there's the whole BSD/GNU convention thing you have to watch out for.

I don't find my ThinkPad running Linux overheats, nor is it particularly heavy. And performance is comparable to the similarly priced MBP at the time. Camera sucks, but compared to my Surface so do the Macs...

Recently an article on HN front page was about a guy who had to file down his MBP because the front edge of it was too sharp and resting his wrists on it hurt his hands. At least two people in the comment section noted how the sweat on their hands over time caused the sharp edge of the MBP chassis to pit and it caused it to turn in to a sharp serrated edge that actually cut their hands.

You can say other laptops are "plastic and shitty" all you want, but Apple's offerings aren't necessarily the best thing out there either. I personally like variety, and you don't get that from Apple. I can choose from hundreds of form factors from a lot of vendors that all run Linux and Windows just fine, plastic or not.

This. I ran Linux at work until last year, when it was finally disallowed. I went with locked-down Mac over locked-down Windows.

>>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac

I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

Weird .. macOS is still completely open is my experience. Can you give an example?

I compile a tool we use, send it to another developer, they can't open it without going through system settings because the OS thinks it's unsafe. There is no blanket easy way to disable this behaviour.

We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation and starting with Tahoe that started to fail - we discovered that it's because of SIP(system integrity protection). We reached out to apple, got the answer that "we will not discuss any functionality related to operation of SIP". Great. So now we either have to disable SIP on every development machine(which IT is very unhappy about) or re-sign the clang executable with our own dev key so that the OS leaves us alone.

If SIP is kicking in, it sounds like you're using the clang that comes with Apple's developer tools. Does this same issue occur with clang sourced from homebrew, or from LLVM's own binary releases?

Yes, it kicks in even with non apple supplied clang(most notably, with the clang supplied as part of the Android toolchain, since we sometimes build Android on MacOS and having to re-sign the google-supplied clang with our own certificate is now a regular thing every time there is an update released).

If it's being sent to another developer then asking them to run xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine on the file so they can run it doesn't seem insurmountable. I agree that it's a non-starter to ask marketing or sales to do that, but developers can manage. Having to sign and then upload the binary to Apple to notarize is also annoying but you put it in a script and go about your day.

But Apple being "completely open", it is not.

> We also inject custom dlibs into clang during compilation

I am curious what you are doing

We use Unreal Build Accelerator which injects a custom dlib into clang to intercept the compilation process and distribute it to worker machines.

I’m curious why this needs to be code injection and not, like, a shell script?

Because...it's official behaviour that is fully supported by clang? If you want to add a hook on compilation start, it's literally the documented way - you include your own dlib with necessary overrides and then you can call your own methods at each compilation step. Not even sure how you'd do it with a shell script? You need to have knowledge of all the compilation and linking units, which....you have from within Clang.

What's the interface this uses? I don't think I am familiar with it

There's a very good explanation in this presentation :-)

https://static.linaro.org/connect/yvr18/presentations/yvr18-...

I work as a consultant for the position, navigation, and timing industry and 10 of 10 devs were on Windows. Before that I worked for a big hollywood company and while scriptwriters and VP executive assistants had Macs, everyone technical was on Windows. Movies were all edited and color graded on Windows.

It makes sense that you use Windows in a video game company. We use windows as well at work and it's absolutely awful for development. I would really prefer a Linux desktop, especially since we exclusively deploy to Linux.

>it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

The people using them typically aren't being paid to customize their OS. The OS is good for if you just want to get stuff done and don't want to worry about the OS.

Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer.

My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born.

Apple built several supercomputers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmsIZUuBoQs

[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

Yeah, they were that, and for the last 20 years they have been the iphone company.

Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future.

Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.

Are you talking about A/UX? That was one of the first Unix systems I was exposed to.

Yes but I had others too. BSD on both 68000 and PowerPC

Did you ever experiment with Mach Ten ? I'm thinking of putting it on an old Mac.

Yes, I ran it also on 68000 and PowerPC Macs. I preferred MacOS with all the MPW environment and tools on top, the GUI was much better: a full WYSIWYG text editor that also was the command line, so you could compose text, copy and paste and also execute it. But that was invented with the workspace in Smalltalk-76 and recreated with MPW.

Email me if you need help restoring it on your Mac, or if you need parts to revive your hardware. I have at least one of every Mac since 1982 (yes I know the Lisa was introduced in januari 1983) including all floppies, CD-ROMs, books, screens, keyboards mice, Appletalk. Although some parts have rusted or decayed beyond repair. I hope someday somebody will buy the whole museum from me.

The best quality Unix we ran was BSDi, you'll find some of that still in NetBSD, OpenBSD and maybe FreeBSD.

The coolest Unix was IRIX though, but that was because of the Grafix code, not the Unix kernel.

It's interesting how "real Unix" is still thrown around as a badge of prestige when Linux basically runs the world now.

> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:

> I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.

for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.

> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

This is one of those comments that is so far away from reality that I can’t tell if it’s trolling.

To give an honest answer: Using Macs for serious development is very common. At bigger tech companies most employees choose Mac even when quality Linux options are available.

I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.

> I’m kind of interested in how someone could reach a point where they thought macs were not used for software development for 20 years.

If you work with engineering or CAD software then Macs aren't super common at all. They're definitely ubiquitous in the startup/webapp world, but not necessarily synonymous with programming or development itself.

Most "serious" companies do not support Linux in their IT infrastructure. I've begged to run Linux, but it's a hard no from IT. They only support Windows and MacOS, and that's all. So I choose a Windows desktop, because I am not a fan of Apple. Having been forced to use Macs in past jobs, I'll choose Windows every time. I liked being able to dual-boot Windows on a MBP in the past, but that is no longer an option.

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