[temac]

Development for Apple devices is wide in volume but narrow in scope.

You pretty much don't develop anything else on Mac OS. No web, no embedded, no Linux, no Windows, no nothing. Only Mac OS software, iPhone apps, etc. I am exaggerating slightly, but you get the idea.

Or when you do, you use your Mac OS laptop as a terminal. Or at best, something to run VMs, and in both cases you don't develop with Apple OS / tools, it's just hosting or giving you non-integrated access to completely different systems.

Apple things are a pretty much distinct and closed ecosystem, and one which is quite limited to (some) endpoints.

[freehunter]

None of anything of what you said makes any sense at all. I absolutely develop web applications on my Mac, using a graphical IDE. I've also developed for Arduino boards using a graphical IDE on my Mac. I've written software natively on my Mac that I put into production on Linux and Windows machines. And all of that is supported on the M1 as well. They even built a complete and complex and powerful subsystem to allow you to run Intel code on their new processor.

Apple has never stopped me from installing VSCode or Atom or Sublime or Jetbrains and they've never given me any reason to think they would do so in the future, especially given Rosetta 2. I've never run a VM on my Mac.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make here, so I'm trying my hardest to argue against the best possible interpretation, and that interpretation is still so unbelievably wrong that I still feel like I must be missing the point.

[temac]

Thanks for giving some counter-examples :)

So I already wrote that I was exaggerating slightly, and I still believe your case fall into that. For example about embedded dev, I had in mind things less individual tinkerer oriented and more productized. I don't know: set-top-boxes, base stations, software for trains, software for washing machines, smartcards, etc; or even big equipment controlled by an OTS desktop/laptop-like computer, or a PLC. I'm sure in a few exotic cases Mac will be involve here and there, but lets be honest, Windows as an host dev station is far more probable. Maybe a few Linux too, but probably far from the majority. And Mac OS would be probably: very far.

Now about running Intel code, I know about the excellent x86 emulation layer Mac OS+M1 have, and it's great, but I actually don't care at all for what I was thinking about, I think that broadly apply for x86 Mac as well. I'm more thinking about the software ecosystem, the precise HW CPU for devs is only interesting maybe for people developing SIMD code or, well, running VMs.

About running VSCode & co, that's great to but where are the toolchains for Mac OS host for the targets I talked about? That's why I qualified Mac OS in this case as merely used as a "terminal", I was speaking in the broad meaning of the term, a graphical terminal, not just a VT100 like terminal. The actual toolchains are elsewhere.

About web-dev, I admit that's probably where you can do most of the non-Apple-only dev while staying really native, although probably not if you need a complex server-side setup. Arguably I went way too far when I wrote "no web".

Well, nothing is absolute, and I know Mac OS remains a general purpose OS even able to host some serious dev. Just I think it is not really the most used one outside of let's say client related consumer tech and some pro-desktop tasks, mainly on Apple techs. Claiming embedded in the general case would really be stretching the narrative.

[saagarjha]

For completeness’s sake, the arm-none-eabi-gcc and GDB multiarch I have on my Mac lets me do embedded development ;)

[nicoburns]

I imagine there might be a lot of embedded toolchains that only run on windows, so I can see that being used there. But in my experience the vast majority of web development (here in the UK at least, but I get the impression it's similar in the US and the rest of Europe) is done on macs. And you can see that reflected in the software support. Languages/ecosystems like Python and Ruby still don't have support for Windows that's on par with mac/linux support.

[temac]

Yeah I take back what I wrote for web-dev. Although I find Linux broader than Mac Os in this case because the server side is likely to be Linux in prod and never Mac Os, and in some complex cases it will also be Linux in dev. But even with that, yes big parts of web-dev take place on Mac Os.

[likeclockwork]

Unless they use docker, in which case it takes place in a Linux VM on Mac OS.

[kergonath]

> I am exaggerating slightly, but you get the idea.

You are exaggerating wildly, and I am not sure what your idea is. Why is web or embedded dev impossible on a Mac?

[temac]

Web-dev I mostly take it back (well this is subtle: for complex server side dev scenario you will use Linux even in dev -- but even with that enough work remain possible under purely Mac Os to not say that web-dev broadly can't be done)

But embedded: where are the most used tools for FPGA? where are the compilers for microcontrollers? Of course you can do some, in a limited capacity, with a subset of targets and a subset of toolchains, not the most used on earth. But broadly in that area, yeah you don't use Mac Os.

[kergonath]

There aren’t that many tools that are on Linux but not macOS. You’re probably right for FPGAs (which I tend to consider a small subset of embedded, but of course there are different points of view), but the standard tooling for embedded platforms is there on MacOS, including some of the IDEs (I am not going to say most, because I am sure there are counter-examples).