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by juicy-fruit 3108 days ago
This is amazing news. As a developer the idea of writing once and running on many platforms is weight off our shoulders.

However, I can also see how a lot of developers might not like this. For example, Cultured Code charges $13.99 for Things on iOS but $49.99 on Mac. Why the difference? It is mostly because users expect apps to be cheap on mobile even though developing for both platforms is comparable. However now, developers are going to be expected by users to support both iOS and Mac apps for the same price.

Also, I feel like this news might imply ARM based macOS?
2 comments
trollied 3108 days ago
No, it won’t imply ARM macOS. It’s obviously a distinct possibility, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they went that way one day. In fact, given release builds uploaded to Apple are basically just an intermediate llvm bitstream, Apple could theoretically release to any architecture.
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astrange 3108 days ago
llvm bitcode is a compiler IR and nothing else, it's not architecture-independent. There have been independent bytecodes based on it like PNaCL and SPIR-V, but they're not nearly good enough to run any old app on.
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valuearb 3108 days ago
No developer will be forced to use this, it will be for enterprise developers and low volume specialists. Pricing will stay the same.

And ARM ain’t coming to MacOS anytime soon. The costs are far higher than benefits.

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