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It matters for targeting "Apple Silicon" (aka M1, for now) Macs. It's complex to build a binary that works at feature parity on M1. Licensing requirements for
by AaronFriel 4y ago
It matters for targeting "Apple Silicon" (aka M1, for now) Macs. It's complex to build a binary that works at feature parity on M1.
Licensing requirements for VMs and lack of server hardware that can be put in datacenters are both obstacles to target Apple Silicon. Not insurmountable, you can build enclosures for a rack of Mac Studios & Mac Pros and orchestrate VMs with Hypervisor framework, but it's a large enough obstacle that major cloud providers don't offer it and that pushes large costs onto the CI providers, which then get pushed to the folks trying to build tooling that works on M1 Macs. That includes the open source ecosystem.
The alternative is cross compilation, either cross-arch or cross-platform or both. All of these options are brittle and complex.
Speaking from experience here, I've had to follow issue trackers for: programming language teams shipping parity for M1, major libraries (think of foundational libraries like GRPC's libraries for each language) not yet shipping binaries for M1, and developer tools and OSS teams producing binaries. All of this needs to come together, and it hasn't yet.
The whole ecosystem is straining under the weight of this complexity to target engineers' laptops.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kayodelycaon 4y agoMac Pros can be ordered in a rack-mountable case.
- gentle 4y agoUh, huh. They're laughably expensive and not untradable or serviceable in any way.
- greedo 4y agoI guess you don't consider AWS a major cloud provider? https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/ You can choose from either x86 or M1 machines.
- AaronFriel 4y ago"Request access for the preview." It's been nearly two years since the Apple Silicon kits first shipped, and the only instances you can purchase from AWS are metal instances, at approx. $10k/year/instance. That's not accessible to open source/free software projects and not affordable or efficient to utilize for small projects and highly intermittent workloads like CI.
- dev_tty01 4y ago$10K/year. Wow. How does that math make any sense?
- AaronFriel 4y agoAnd the minimum lease time is 24 hours, making it inaccessible to hobbyists or on-demand, intermittent work. I wish MacOS licensing were available for Graviton and ARMv8 generic, that would be incredible. It isn't, and the costs to support Apple's platform is a substantial barrier for many projects.
- greedo 4y agoRidiculous. You can buy an M1 Mac mini for $699 (MSRP) and often for $599 from resellers. To develop a Mac or iOS app, you need a Mac, so you're not spending more. Hobbyists? I spend $700/year to have access to a maker space. I spend that much on woodworking tools annually (if not more). Hobbyist doesn't mean free.