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> shelling out thousands of dollars to buy a Mac Or you can buy one for a few hundred and that works fine too... It's a nice hack, but if you build software fo

> shelling out thousands of dollars to buy a Mac Or you can buy one for a few hundred and that works fine too... It's a nice hack, but if you build software for Mac it really isn't more expensive than building software for Windows for example. If you want to sign/resell/other_thing_here that's a different story, but not related to your shell or building.

jph00 6y ago
I built it because I needed to build and test conda packages easily. Without it, I just wouldn't have bothered and would have only created Linux versions.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I built and maintain dory[1] which supports macOS, but I haven't had a mac to test with in many years, and I'm not giving any more of my money to Apple (I happily would if they respected my freedom, but that's not likely to happen so I don't usually mention this caveat). However I care about the humans who benefit from the software and run on mac, so I try to maintain support. This might be a great way for me to actually test instead of asking the community to test for me :-) [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/dory https://github.com/FreedomBen/dory
tootie 6y ago
Building for mac is at least marginally more expensive. Especially if you're a mobile dev. I find it utterly galling that if I own an iPhone, I can't install my own software without buying an apple computer and paying apple to let me be a developer for the two devices I bought. And CICD world has definitely improved but since Mac doesn't allow VMs you can only only build on hardware. For example, paying for build minutes via GitHub actions for OSX costs 5x as much as windows and 10x as much as Linux.
- oneplane 6y ago
  Is it? You buy a 500$ computer and off you go, no extra costs. Same if you get a computer for Windows or Linux. Same if you target a different device, you still need to get that development system, regardless of the vendor.
  - tootie 6y ago
    $500 for what? The current Mac Mini with an i3 and 8GB is $800 and it isn't really powerful enough as a dev machine. Equivalent Windows computers are much cheaper. If you're an organization, you're buying dozens or hundreds. And just buying workstations isn't the only thing you'll need.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      Why do you need to buy a current Mac Mini? A Mac Mini from 2014 does the same job. And how is a i3 not enough? Unless your time costs a lot of money it doesn't really matter if your code compiles 20% faster or not, does it? And when your time is very valuable and you make money with your software, an expense to make that happen seems rather trivial, right? Also, if you are an organisation you're not going to cheap out on your tools (at least not where I'm from). So your multi-thousand workstation that delivers multiples of that in revenue is really not that big of a deal. There is one, and only one case where it's a problem: if you don't make money, but do want the latest and greatest and access to a commercial platform. And in that case it sucks that your values and wishes are not aligned with the commercial interests, but that's life.
      - originalvichy 6y ago
        You can’t legitimately make excuses for Apple’s terrible CICD support. If I was an Apple engineer I’d be ashamed of how bad it is. I thought Windows was a pain in the ass but they’ve stepped up and they’re almost done with containerized Windows. Is it gonna take 10 more years until we have viable test environments for Apple? 15? At this point I’d say it’s more likely they’ll never bother. There can’t be any other reason to be this late.
- toyg 6y ago
  Look up AltStore.io.

jph00 6y ago

I built it because I needed to build and test conda packages easily. Without it, I just wouldn't have bothered and would have only created Linux versions.

freedomben 6y ago
I built and maintain dory[1] which supports macOS, but I haven't had a mac to test with in many years, and I'm not giving any more of my money to Apple (I happily would if they respected my freedom, but that's not likely to happen so I don't usually mention this caveat). However I care about the humans who benefit from the software and run on mac, so I try to maintain support. This might be a great way for me to actually test instead of asking the community to test for me :-) [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/dory https://github.com/FreedomBen/dory

tootie 6y ago

Building for mac is at least marginally more expensive. Especially if you're a mobile dev. I find it utterly galling that if I own an iPhone, I can't install my own software without buying an apple computer and paying apple to let me be a developer for the two devices I bought. And CICD world has definitely improved but since Mac doesn't allow VMs you can only only build on hardware. For example, paying for build minutes via GitHub actions for OSX costs 5x as much as windows and 10x as much as Linux.

oneplane 6y ago
Is it? You buy a 500$ computer and off you go, no extra costs. Same if you get a computer for Windows or Linux. Same if you target a different device, you still need to get that development system, regardless of the vendor.
- tootie 6y ago
  $500 for what? The current Mac Mini with an i3 and 8GB is $800 and it isn't really powerful enough as a dev machine. Equivalent Windows computers are much cheaper. If you're an organization, you're buying dozens or hundreds. And just buying workstations isn't the only thing you'll need.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    Why do you need to buy a current Mac Mini? A Mac Mini from 2014 does the same job. And how is a i3 not enough? Unless your time costs a lot of money it doesn't really matter if your code compiles 20% faster or not, does it? And when your time is very valuable and you make money with your software, an expense to make that happen seems rather trivial, right? Also, if you are an organisation you're not going to cheap out on your tools (at least not where I'm from). So your multi-thousand workstation that delivers multiples of that in revenue is really not that big of a deal. There is one, and only one case where it's a problem: if you don't make money, but do want the latest and greatest and access to a commercial platform. And in that case it sucks that your values and wishes are not aligned with the commercial interests, but that's life.
    - originalvichy 6y ago
      You can’t legitimately make excuses for Apple’s terrible CICD support. If I was an Apple engineer I’d be ashamed of how bad it is. I thought Windows was a pain in the ass but they’ve stepped up and they’re almost done with containerized Windows. Is it gonna take 10 more years until we have viable test environments for Apple? 15? At this point I’d say it’s more likely they’ll never bother. There can’t be any other reason to be this late.
toyg 6y ago
Look up AltStore.io.