• abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Apple said EVERYBODY MAKE ARM APPS NOW

    Uh, no. What they did is make sure x86 software still works perfectly. And not just Mac software - you can run x86 Linux server software on a Mac with Docker, and you can run DirectX x86 PC games on a Mac with WINE. Those third party projects didn’t do it on their own, Apple made extensive contributions to those projects.

    I’d like to go into more detail but as a third party developer (not for any of the projects I mentioned above) I signed an NDA with Apple relating to the transition process before you could even buy an ARM powered Mac. Suffice to say the fruit company helped developers far and wide with the transition.

    And yes, they wanted developers to port software over to run natively, but that was step 2 of the transition. Step 1 was (and still is) making sure software doesn’t actually need to be ported at all. Apple has done major architecture switches like this several times and are very good at them. This was by far the most difficult transition Apple has ever done but it was also the smoothest one.

    It’s 2024, and I still have software running on my Mac that hasn’t been ported. If that software is slow, I can’t tell. It’s certainly not buggy.

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 months ago

      Only real issues that I’ve seen lately are upstream with QEMU, which will probably be sorted soon, if they’re not already. I’m absolutely amazed at how well they implemented the x86_64 compatibility.

      • olympicyes@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        If found that a few open source apps that are stubbornly Intel only binaries can be compiled as universal apps in Xcode. For example OpenEmu.