7 ms·

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

tempest_ 5mo ago
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.
- thomascountz 5mo ago
  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.
  - tempest_ 5mo ago
    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.
- amelius 5mo ago
  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.
  - BoorishBears 5mo ago
    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.
    - moondev 5mo ago
      An artificial limit on the number vms you are allowed to launch doesn't make it solid
      - newdee 5mo ago
        macOS* VMs. And if you don’t care about that, is it no longer solid?
- jonhohle 5mo ago
  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.
  - tempest_ 5mo ago
    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.
    - RestartKernel 5mo ago
      > 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.
    - jonhohle 5mo ago
      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.
    - wpm 5mo ago
      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.
      - realusername 5mo ago
        > 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.
- jaredklewis 5mo ago
  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.
  - OptionOfT 5mo ago
    I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.
    - hparadiz 5mo ago
      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.
      - c0balt 5mo ago
        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.
        invalidname 5mo ago
        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.
- morphle 5mo ago
  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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
  - tempest_ 5mo ago
    Yeah, they were that, and for the last 20 years they have been the iphone company.
  - smackeyacky 5mo ago
    Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future. Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.
  - icedchai 5mo ago
    Are you talking about A/UX? That was one of the first Unix systems I was exposed to.
    - morphle 5mo ago
      Yes but I had others too. BSD on both 68000 and PowerPC
      - icedchai 5mo ago
        Did you ever experiment with Mach Ten ? I'm thinking of putting it on an old Mac.
        morphle 5mo ago
        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.
- trueno 5mo ago
  > 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.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - bigyabai 5mo ago
    > 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.
  - leptons 5mo ago
    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.

tempest_ 5mo ago

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.

thomascountz 5mo ago
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.
- tempest_ 5mo ago
  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.
amelius 5mo ago
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.
- BoorishBears 5mo ago
  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.
  - moondev 5mo ago
    An artificial limit on the number vms you are allowed to launch doesn't make it solid
    - newdee 5mo ago
      macOS* VMs. And if you don’t care about that, is it no longer solid?
jonhohle 5mo ago
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.
- tempest_ 5mo ago
  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.
  - RestartKernel 5mo ago
    > 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.
  - jonhohle 5mo ago
    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.
  - wpm 5mo ago
    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.
    - realusername 5mo ago
      > 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.
jaredklewis 5mo ago
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.
- OptionOfT 5mo ago
  I have the feeling a lot of people take Macs because the other option is a locked down Windows, and Linux is not offered.
  - hparadiz 5mo ago
    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.
    - c0balt 5mo ago
      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.
      - invalidname 5mo ago
        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.
morphle 5mo ago
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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
- tempest_ 5mo ago
  Yeah, they were that, and for the last 20 years they have been the iphone company.
- smackeyacky 5mo ago
  Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future. Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.
- icedchai 5mo ago
  Are you talking about A/UX? That was one of the first Unix systems I was exposed to.
  - morphle 5mo ago
    Yes but I had others too. BSD on both 68000 and PowerPC
    - icedchai 5mo ago
      Did you ever experiment with Mach Ten ? I'm thinking of putting it on an old Mac.
      - morphle 5mo ago
        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.
trueno 5mo ago
> 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.
Aurornis 5mo ago
> 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.
- bigyabai 5mo ago
  > 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.
- leptons 5mo ago
  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.