App development on intel macs

[LimitR]

Will an Apple Silicon mac be required to develop Apple Silicon apps? Will we able to compile to Apple Silicon on current intel devices or are we going to be forced to upgrade to a Mac with the new cpu architecture?

I’m a bit lost seeing Apple shipping out DTKs for the transition. Is that just for bug testing on the new architecture? Will being able to create apps on intel macs be phased out?

Thanks in advance.

 

[KALLT]

Xcode compiles code for arm64 just fine (just as it does for iPhones and iPads). Apple does not seem to be bringing a “macOS simulator”, so to test the arm64 binaries for macOS, you have to run them on an arm64-capable Mac.

 

[casperes1996]

Xcode compiles code for arm64 just fine (just as it does for iPhones and iPads). Apple does not seem to be bringing a “macOS simulator”, so to test the arm64 binaries for macOS, you have to run them on an arm64-capable Mac.

The iOS Simulator runs x86 and doesn't behave entirely like an actual device, so a macOS Simulator in the same vein as the iOS Simulator wouldn't really make a difference either .

For higher level APIs there's not much of a difference on the code. It's only apps that are written "close to the metal" that'll really need to be reworked in a meaningful ways. Higher level apps will do with a recompile and that's it, and there shouldn't even be bug differences.

But yeah DTKs are mostly just for testing. You could in theory have written ARM code a year ago as well. The macOS frameworks weren't available to hook into as ARM, but you could write ARM instructions no problem. I've written code for my ARM based Raspberry Pi on my Mac and it works just fine. You can even run ARM code on Intel Macs through QEMU; Made easy with a Docker image that sets up an ARM Linux environment for you

 

[leman]

As others have said, you can compile code for ARM just fine using the Intel platform, but for testing you really want an ARM Mac. I imagine that CI servers offering virtualized ARM Big Sur test machines will spring up overnight If I had half a million lying around I’d invest into that kind of business myself 😅

 

[casperes1996]

As others have said, you can compile code for ARM just fine using the Intel platform, but for testing you really want an ARM Mac. I imagine that CI servers offering virtualized ARM Big Sur test machines will spring up overnight If I had half a million lying around I’d invest into that kind of business myself 😅

Apple has actually introduced new parallel device testing features to Xcode Build to allow both simultaneous testing on the same platform, sending different test classes to different devices to speed it up, as well as splitting up tests based on architecture so all tests get run on both architectures in parallel as well. The big CI providers could really leverage that