So we've already discussed here on the channel how apple transitioning to its
own made arm processors is going to be huge for
enterprise users and consumers but what does it mean for developers
stick around
hey everyone welcome back to today in tech I'm Juliet Beauchamp and i'm here
with Infoworld senior writer Serdar Yegulalp
and serdar first of all thank you so much for joining me and i
this is huge news right i mean the fact that apple is ditching intel
after years and years of using intel processors is really big news
and like i mentioned we've sort of covered the gravity of the situation
and how it applies to you know your everyday user but i'm curious can you
tell me why this is so huge in the developer
community first of all it's going to mean a
certain amount of work for developers at the very least it means that if they
want their applications to work as best they can with apple's new arm
silicon it means their apps are going to have to be recompiled
and they're going to have to take on the responsibility of doing that themselves
and that may not be the worst thing in the world and i'll go into some detail
about that a little later um but that is the first and most
important thing that it means for them it means that they have to sit down with
the apps that they have and put them through the next version of
whatever um apple's uh new tool chain is gonna be
it's probably just gonna be another version of xcode which they are already
familiar with i doubt there's going to be anything too jarring there
but the main problem that that some developers will have is if they don't
have the time or the luxury of recompiling what options do they have
and the short version is that apple's going to be offering them an
integrated emulation system called rosetta 2.
this is um a successor to an earlier system also called rosetta
and what this does is allows arm-based macs to run intel code
natively the apps do not have to be recompiled and
earlier um in the mid 2000s when apple switched from power pc to intel they had
rosetta then to allow power pcs to run uh intel
software um but apple was
not confident that the performance would be completely up to snuff they ran just
not well um but they're more confident now so
they say that the newer emulation that they have
will not be anywhere nearly as as challenging for bigger applications
especially since the bigger applications are the ones that will take more time to
be reworked and so they will be the ones who will
almost certainly be running an emulation first
so this transition was obviously years and years in the making i mean
it was rumored well before its official announcement at wwdc
in june but i'm wondering how could have developers prepared for this
transition before it was officially announced
could they prepare and what are they doing or what should they be doing now
to make sure that their apps are you know up just enough for the arm-based
macs that are going to be i think begin to be rolled out possibly
at the end of this year before i answer that i just want to
clarify something i said earlier um about the emulation system because i
think i may have accidentally reversed a couple of points
um what rosetta allowed people to do was run power pc apps
on intel um and again with a puff with a possible performance in here it's the
reverse they're running intel apps on powerpc
but allegedly without as much of a hit now as far as what developers could have
been doing to prepare for all of this honestly um word has been in the wind
about this as far back as 2018 you know depending
on how wide your ears were open there were
there were folks with deep roots in the apple community who was saying
apple is going to ditch intel processors entirely by 2020.
and there was some precedent for this of course as you know there was the powerpc
to intel transition to begin with and all of this actually
also stems from things that have only recently come to light about
apple's long-term ambitions last year there were some interesting
documents leaked from from within apple dating back to 1989 about something
called project scorpius the idea was it was a custom silicon
that would be used to allow strategic advantages for
apple made machines the problem was that at the time apple was simply not a big
enough company and did not have the clout that it does
today to have to pull off something like that and so the audio was shelved
now when apple broke away from ibm and motorola
to uh to switch to intel there were there were very good reasons for this
they were getting frustrated with intel and a lot of developers i think were
sharing the same frustration because um intel's processors were running it
were running below three gigahertz on the desktop and they weren't
they sorry motorola processors were running below three gigahertz for the
desktop and the um the mobile versions of
motorola's processors couldn't be scaled down effectively to
take advantage of lower voltages and so intel was offering them all these things
and that's why they switched and now intel has turned into the liability
so developers have been eyeing all of this and saying we sense a change in the
wind and sure enough you know two years ago
rumors started flying and now it's all true there is going to be
this massive change and it they will probably have you know a
certain open-ended amount of time to deal with that
you know there's having the emulation layer in place we'll give them give them
a certain buffer but the pressure will be on for them to
recompile everything so now the developers have been handed
the kit what sort of challenges or changes are
have they been encountering or should they expect to encounter
and i'm really curious about what some of these higher level
differences and changes are going to be for developers
you know making sure that your apps now can run on apple silicon
as opposed to intel chips and the main thing again is that they're going to be
given a new version of apple's development uh tool chain which is xcode
and for most applications most of the most of the day-to-day type stuff
those apps tend to be written at a higher enough level that the transition
should not be terribly jarring you know there may be individual things
that need some attention for the most part they should they should recompile
as is that's the hope anyway um what's again the big issue is when
you have an application the size of say the adobe
suite or microsoft office we have something really big and really
sprawling with lots of components um one of the ideas that i've agreed it
is that you could have a direct transpiler that you could instead of
running an emulation you could have something
that would be um decompiled and recompiled but i think i think rosetta
is going to take care of that that's not if that isn't in fact what
rosetta two turns out to be um but i think also what what devs
really um want to be able to have um at this
stage is development hardware that's cheap enough
that they will be able to make this transition that they can buy a
reasonably inexpensive arm machine uh running the new mac os
and that they can do their transition work on that machine without having to
shut without them to shell out thousands of dollars
um especially if they they did not if they've already made an upgrade
relatively recently and they're still smarting from that
um another thing i'm thinking is going to be off the table for developers
completely uh at least for the near future is the
possibility of dual booting these new machines because
one of the advantages of the intel max was that you could deal with them
between mac os and windows and for people who were developing on
both os's or who were forced to use both oss for whatever reason this was a big
boom with arm the only way to really do that
is to run an emulation basically to run a
virtual machine with windows in it or and this seems deeply unlikely to me
to have a version of windows on arm delivered that runs specifically on
the new arm powered max windows on arm itself is a reality now that's that
started to come together very quickly in the last few months
um but this specific flavor of our may not necessarily be something that
windows supports so that that is almost certainly going to be something that
people are going to have to do through a vm so
apple silicon like we sort of already gone over and like i've gone over in
previous videos with ken and mike it's it's huge for a variety of reasons
and the what it basically means especially as
you know with 3004 or an umbrella view is apple is now
contr in control of a lot more of its ecosystem so when it
comes to software development is there going to
be now sort of increased i guess synergy as a buzzword between mac os
and ios or ipad os and the short answer is there already is
and it's by with uh mac catalyst which allows you to write applications
that um run that much more uh readily on both platforms like for
instance one of the problems of writing um
a mac application and trying to port it to ios or vice versa
is that you have to take into account the way that touch behaviors work in
both environments or don't work you know when you have in one case where you want
to substitute mouse for touch or vice versa and you
have to do all of this manual fiddling catalyst makes that sort of thing easier
so the idea is that you can write more apps that will be deployable
that much more readily across both platforms at the same time
um and that's a huge boon for people who have always had to choose one or the
other now they're going to be still plenty of reasons to choose one of the
other some there are some things that will run very well in a tablet
on a phone or even on the watch um that simply have no place in the desktop and
vice versa but there are there is going to be an expanding subset
of applications that will that will work in both environments perhaps not
the same full degree of functionality but will still be useful there
and so this will this will make it easier to expand the range of apps that
can that can work across that divide
well thank you so much sirdar this is all really exciting and i think
it's exciting across the board if not in some ways particularly challenging for
the developer community but this is i think something that we're going to be
talking about for much much longer so if any of our
viewers have any questions comments please be sure to leave them below
and i'll get back to you or i'll get back to you on cerner's behalf
thank you so much serdar thanks again and thank you all so much for watching
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are a software developer i want to hear what challenges you've been facing or
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