Its why does this have to be a thing now? Did anyone want this? Honestly, I have not heard anyone asking for it before or after it was released. If it's ambiguous, then why is this at top of HN?
I want this. I dislike depending on rosetta. I want native, and I am saddened that Apple didn't reach out to homebrew or macports to pre-arrange something. It speaks badly of the future, they're so indifferent to the developer experience.
I downvoted your comment. I think this article is spot on for HN, and I think you showed a lack of critical self-awareness questioning its relevance.
What Apple claims to have done and what Apple actually does are two very different things. Apple has reached out to some projects with various levels of support, but it's not like they just dropped by all of those projects with patches on the day of WWDC.
>but it's not like they just dropped by all of those projects with patches on the day of WWDC.
Apple had their own stuff to develop, including a new architecture, a new OS version for 2 architectures, ports of all their apps, and several other stuff besides, including the UNIX userland they ship.
The idea that a company should be responsible for all third party FOSS stuff on its platform, used by a small minority of users, is a little strange...
That said, a MacPorts guy below says that "Apple engineers had patches for basic support ready fairly quickly".
I'm not claiming they should have done anything. I was actually pleasantly surprised when they said they would. I'm just saying that they didn't show up with all the fixes as some may have believed from what Apple said during WWDC.
How on earth is distributing common Unix tools for MacOS that aren't included in the base OS not "using the underlying UNIX". This is exactly what Unix was designed to enable. Apple understand and values this, which is why they have submitted patches for these projects.
I could quibble with the "Most of" part, most of it is stuff you don't get in MacOS at all, but that aside so what?
This isn't really about alternative ecosystems, it's about complementary ecosystems. There are a lot of people that use MacOS desktops alongside Linux or other Unix machines. For these people having a common set of tools that work the same, so you can use the same command lines and scripts across multiple platforms, is incredibly useful.
What do you think people use Homebrew for? brew list gives me mailhog, mysql, postgresql, newer python, newer ruby, macvim, node, redis, ... these aren't IN the "UNIX provided in the macOS box".
Homebrew and Macports maintainers could have easily reached out to Apple and gotten free DTKs to port with, just like thousands of other developers.
But the truth is that XCode built software is far more important to Mac users and that’s where Apples focus was. Homebrew users are less than 1% of their installed base.
The other truth is the M1 hadn’t been important to Homebrew maintainers. At least not yet.
On the MacPorts side, I know that at least Saagar Jha (who posts on HN often) did indeed have a DTK. Perhaps consequently (?), MacPorts does support ARM right now.
I have very little to do with MacPorts's ARM support, I'm not even a maintainer ;) Most of that infrastructure was already there from the PowerPC→Intel transition, and Apple engineers had patches for basic support ready fairly quickly. I worked a little bit on early support for some heavily-depended-on packages, but I wasn't really directly involved in the effort.
Whooops! I only mentioned you because I remembered you were listed on MacPorts's website until recently, as a contact for "Apple DTK issues" or something like that.
I downvoted your comment. I think this article is spot on for HN, and I think you showed a lack of critical self-awareness questioning its relevance.