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So it's mainly an iOS limitation? I don't understand why it shouldn't be possible to take the same route software like WINE or WSL have taken before on a less c

So it's mainly an iOS limitation? I don't understand why it shouldn't be possible to take the same route software like WINE or WSL have taken before on a less constrained OS like macOS.

saagarjha 8y ago
Yes, this is mostly an iOS limitation rather than a hardware one. There are many ways to make something like this work if iOS allowed things like forking processes or JIT (for App Store apps)–actually if this was possible, the project at that point would probably just be "spawn a shell" instead of "emulate x86 and bootstrap a whole Alpine Linux install", since this is what most terminal emulators on Android do.
- lloeki 8y ago
  > the project at that point would probably just be "spawn a shell" instead of "emulate x86 and bootstrap a whole Alpine Linux install", since this is what most terminal emulators on Android do. Or jailbroken iOS for that matter (at least when I last did a jailbreak which was quite some years ago, I honestly don't know about the current situation)
  - nathan_f77 8y ago
    I kind of miss being able to SSH into my iPhone and run scripts, or just poke around the filesystem. It was fun to have a terminal app and editor where I could edit some code, and then deploy changes to a server. That was about 8 years ago. I might do that again sometime. It's not urgent though, and I wouldn't switch to Android just for that. But I keep an eye on the jailbreak community. I also really like the idea of having a portable keyboard and screen to turn my phone into a little development machine. I think the CPU is actually more powerful than my old 2012 MacBook, although it doesn't have as much RAM.
    - jsjohnst 8y ago
      > It was fun to have a terminal app and editor where I could edit some code, and then deploy changes to a server. There’s a number of apps on the App Store already that allow exactly this. Two of my personal favorites are Blink and Termius (use them both, but for different reasons).
      - nathan_f77 8y ago
        Oh yeah, thanks, I was looking at Blink earlier. Haha actually I don't really need it, so I didn't install it. It was more about the feeling of "hacking" my device and doing something that it wasn't supposed to do. And having a real shell with access to the iOS file system, where I could script the phone to do all kinds of things, and write little programs that could run on a cron schedule. Stuff like that. For example, I wrote a little script that would change my iOS wallpaper once every hour, and it would take the images from a Dropbox folder.

So it's mainly an iOS limitation? I don't understand why it shouldn't be possible to take the same route software like WINE or WSL have taken before on a less constrained OS like macOS.

saagarjha 8y ago

Yes, this is mostly an iOS limitation rather than a hardware one. There are many ways to make something like this work if iOS allowed things like forking processes or JIT (for App Store apps)–actually if this was possible, the project at that point would probably just be "spawn a shell" instead of "emulate x86 and bootstrap a whole Alpine Linux install", since this is what most terminal emulators on Android do.

lloeki 8y ago
> the project at that point would probably just be "spawn a shell" instead of "emulate x86 and bootstrap a whole Alpine Linux install", since this is what most terminal emulators on Android do. Or jailbroken iOS for that matter (at least when I last did a jailbreak which was quite some years ago, I honestly don't know about the current situation)
- nathan_f77 8y ago
  I kind of miss being able to SSH into my iPhone and run scripts, or just poke around the filesystem. It was fun to have a terminal app and editor where I could edit some code, and then deploy changes to a server. That was about 8 years ago. I might do that again sometime. It's not urgent though, and I wouldn't switch to Android just for that. But I keep an eye on the jailbreak community. I also really like the idea of having a portable keyboard and screen to turn my phone into a little development machine. I think the CPU is actually more powerful than my old 2012 MacBook, although it doesn't have as much RAM.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    > It was fun to have a terminal app and editor where I could edit some code, and then deploy changes to a server. There’s a number of apps on the App Store already that allow exactly this. Two of my personal favorites are Blink and Termius (use them both, but for different reasons).
    - nathan_f77 8y ago
      Oh yeah, thanks, I was looking at Blink earlier. Haha actually I don't really need it, so I didn't install it. It was more about the feeling of "hacking" my device and doing something that it wasn't supposed to do. And having a real shell with access to the iOS file system, where I could script the phone to do all kinds of things, and write little programs that could run on a cron schedule. Stuff like that. For example, I wrote a little script that would change my iOS wallpaper once every hour, and it would take the images from a Dropbox folder.