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> third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today This announcement is hardly a surprise. The writing has b

> third parties outside Apple who haven't even heard of the possibility of this happening until today This announcement is hardly a surprise. The writing has been on the wall for at least the last 5 years since LLVM replaced GCC in XCode. It became even more obvious when Apple started compiling to "Bitcode" so that they could deliver optimized binaries to devices. What that replacement meant is that it would ease Apple's transition away from any particular architecture - developers shouldn't have to do much if the app is installed from the App Store.

gurkendoktor 9y ago
> The writing has been on the wall for at least the last 5 years since LLVM replaced GCC in XCode. It became even more obvious when Apple started compiling to "Bitcode" so that they could deliver optimized binaries to devices. These weren't clear signs of an upcoming ARM switch: • Apple has been purging software that's under the GPL for quite a while now, and GCC was probably high on the list since Apple (NeXT) had been bitten by its license before[1]. • The Intel switch in 2006 was extremely smooth even using GCC. • Bitcode is not enabled on macOS, and even if it were, it's not abstract enough to recompile an x86 app for ARM[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9728162