It's been terrible. Recently I had to reset my apple developer password, and they literally went "oh, you don't have any available apple hardware? Well.... We can still do it, but now it will take several days". And this is after 2FA through SMS. It's been a week now, and stil no update.
I honestly think apple and their excellent marketing and previous decent hardware alternatives, is one of the worst things to happen to consumer computing. It served the
"not Windows"-itch for a couple of decades, drawing driver and software manufacture towards a closed OS. Sometimes I think about what could have been. Hopefully getting there, just much more slowly.
Apple Silicon seems like a pretty decent current hardware alternative, for some use cases at least
> It served the "not Windows"-itch for a couple of decades
For many people it also served the the Apple II, and pre-Windows-3 Macintosh, and iPod, and iPhone, and iPad, and Apple Watch, and AirPod itches, etc..
Zig should be able to do it (the Zig toolchain can also be used to build regular C/C++/ObjC projects, not just Zig). But I think there's still work to be done to be able to build complete applications which could be uploaded to the Store. You also need a separate iOS SDK because this isn't bundled with Zig:
For debugging you'd still need a Mac and iOS device though, so for the regular development workflow using a Mac still makes sense. But for CI builds being able to build on Linux is pretty big deal.
I honestly think apple and their excellent marketing and previous decent hardware alternatives, is one of the worst things to happen to consumer computing. It served the "not Windows"-itch for a couple of decades, drawing driver and software manufacture towards a closed OS. Sometimes I think about what could have been. Hopefully getting there, just much more slowly.