[lock-free]

General purpose development includes more than developing applications for Apple devices.

XCode is a good example of what I mean. It's a terrible developer experience for anything but targeting Apple's platforms in the way you want to (meaning writing Swift, using their frameworks, and their devtools, and keeping your code base small to keep their devtools functional, and never caring about that code running on a different OS).

Compare to Visual Studio, which also only runs on Windows, yet is a pretty damn good developer experience and not a nightmare to support for cross platform projects of late.

[freehunter]

Yes but until XCode runs somewhere else, Apple has to support C compilers and CLI tools and allowing general-purpose code to run on their machines. XCode relies on all of these things. Just because Apple doesn't make a general-purpose IDE for their platform doesn't mean anything as long as you can install VSCode or vim or Jetbrains or whatever your preferred IDE is.

Again, this is repeated here at least once a week for the how many years I've been visiting this site and it's no closer to being true now than it was back then. If it was even remotely true Apple would have left the Macs on Intel and just phased them out in favor of the iPad Pro, but instead they spent billions making their iPad chips run MacOS and desktop applications and code compiled for Intel processors and real talk here, what about that gives anyone any indication that they're planning on throwing all of that away?

They're actively doing the opposite of what you're claiming and spending billions of dollars to do it, and one blog post that says "this isn't even a big deal" is all it takes to convince you otherwise?

[lock-free]

I was replying to the comment you made about XCode not running on other platforms. That's neither here nor there. My point is it is not a good developer experience for anything but client apps on their operating systems - things like iOS apps and consumer programs, not web design, backend engineering, high performance computing or the slew of other kinds of software that Macs are getting worse at.

This goes deeper than developer tools. The documentation for their core frameworks have been purged from official sources and is relegated to deprecated sites and comments header files tucked away in /Library. Kernel modules are being deprecated. There's no alternative to IPP or MKL on ARM for the M1 chip. Docs for plugins architectures are being more and more hidden away, and Apple's Developer Conference consistently only focuses on consumer facing applications - while support for professional applications and advanced computing is only available if you work for a partner organization, making it less accessible.

The reason I say that Apple is making their platform harder to use for general purpose computing is from my experience shipping code on MacOS for the last decade. It's fine if you disagree, but that hasn't been my experience. Every year it costs me more time and money to target Macs than the year before.

[coldtea]

>XCode is a good example of what I mean. It's a terrible developer experience for anything but targeting Apple's platforms

It was and is built as an IDE for Apple's platforms/languages, so this point is moot, and doesn't prove anything general about macOS as a platform.

It's like saying Emacs is bad for developers, because SLIME doesn't really play well with Javascript coding...