Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

developer.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 450 posts

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#111

Post by valleyjo »

userbinator wrote: post #65
olliej wrote: post #7

Probably the right call - many of them don’t have abi or api stability guarantees, or in the case of python needlessly broke backwards compatibility that is still causing pain today. Apple used to ship an incredibly old version of OpenSSL because people used its API which was not ABI stable. Even getting rid of it was a nontrivial amount of work. The lack of care about API&ABI stability in developer facing open sourc…

It’s part of why companies like Apple and Microsoft care so much about backwards compat Compared to (former) Microsoft, I don't think Apple spends anywhere near the amount of effort MS does on backwards compatibility. You can create a single .exe that will work on any Windows starting from Windows 95 - nearly 25 years. In that timespan, Apple changed CPU architectures twice, and their OS architecture once. If you're…

Completely true. Apple only cares about back-compact down to a few older major versions. So often the big projects (like modern apps, Windows 10 S, etc) Microsoft does fail or struggle to gain traction IMO because of the blessing and curse of their back-compat requirements.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#112

Post by olliej »

bla3 wrote: post #99
olliej wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is accruing security flaws (increasingly difficulty to back port fixes), and also the problems that come up when you install a different version (lots of Software just assumes it can use the same system python, which causes issues when it isn’t the archaic version).

I'd prefer if Apple took care of security fixes instead of some third party. And they could ship newer versions if keeping the old ones secure is harder.

The problem is that updating to a new version isn’t possible if it breaks existing software - what happens is that the end user experience is “I installed these updates and Apple broke my program” so don't update in future, and tell others not to as well.

The only way to stop the OS from including out of date software and libraries is to not ship them if they don’t have stable abi.

That’s what Apple is doing: it can’t reasonably ship them and keep them up to date, so it is going to stop.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#113

Post by olliej »

kpcyrd wrote: post #69
olliej wrote: post #7

Probably the right call - many of them don’t have abi or api stability guarantees, or in the case of python needlessly broke backwards compatibility that is still causing pain today. Apple used to ship an incredibly old version of OpenSSL because people used its API which was not ABI stable. Even getting rid of it was a nontrivial amount of work. The lack of care about API&ABI stability in developer facing open sourc…

If you're referring to the python2->python3 change, this was a pretty important one. Having a string type that isn't required to have valid encoding is an awful idea.

And rather than just accepting that was what you had and accepting that you occasionally had to deal with that (as JavaScript did), they decided to cause a decade of problems that aren’t going to go away just because they’ve now declared python 2.7 dead.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#114

Post by tty2300 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #104
ken wrote: post #76

Not surprising at all. It's become clear that what they've been doing with iOS all along is bootstrapping a new operating system. They started with Unix, not because Unix was optimal for what they wanted to do, but it's what they had and it worked well enough. Copland and Taligent and the rest failed because of Second-System Effect, which Apple was smart enough to avoid. (As RMS wrote in 1983, "Unix is not my ideal s…

They've got enough market clout now that people will port Ruby/Python/Perl to a non-Unix macOS, just as they port them to Microsoft Windows. Ruby on Windows is a nightmare. To be specific, Ruby itself (the core language and core libraries) are pretty good on Windows. Great choice for a scripting language, or whatever else you want to do. But libraries like ActiveRecord, Rails and their myriad dependencies are very ve…

The funny thing is I have been a rails dev for years and didn't even know it didn't work on windows because I have never tried and don't know any dev ever using windows.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#115

Post by fooblitzky_bias »

snowoutside wrote: post #51

With brew as the de-facto package manager for macOS this is a great move. Having Python and Ruby bundled with macOS is confusing when trying to install "regular" versions of the software through brew or other methods. Because the default installation can't updated without updating the OS, the system versions are not useful for most developers.

You're joking, right? Brew is NOT the de-facto package manager, macoports is. Learn what "de-facto" means. Brew is a fucking trainwreck that shits all over "/" and has a tendency to break existing critical features while failing to stay up to date. I wouldn't touch it again with a 10 foot pole, and actively discourage people from using it.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#116

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

maheart wrote: post #103
olliej wrote: post #7

Probably the right call - many of them don’t have abi or api stability guarantees, or in the case of python needlessly broke backwards compatibility that is still causing pain today. Apple used to ship an incredibly old version of OpenSSL because people used its API which was not ABI stable. Even getting rid of it was a nontrivial amount of work. The lack of care about API&ABI stability in developer facing open sourc…

> The lack of care about API&ABI stability in developer facing open source projects (interpreters, libraries, frameworks, commandline arguments) is still bizarre to me: why make your work hard to use/update? If you're a FOSS developer with limited time and man power (and if you're lucky, limited budget) maintaining backwards compatibility is hard. So hard, that new features and bug fixes might have to take a back sea…

> rebuild their entire systems when new versions of software are released/integrated

Yeah, the ability to rebuild the entire system from source whenever you need it has resulted in those communities just not caring about a number of things that really do matter on proprietary systems; it's also part of why Linux doesn't have fat binaries (why bundle multiple architectures together when everybody can just grab or build each one themselves?).

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#117

Post by fooblitzky_bias »

exabrial wrote: post #2

I think that's ok, most everyone installs homebrew

"I think that's ok, most everyone installs homebrew"

Most everyone who doesn't know better. Brew is a trainwreck that breaks critical functions in macOS.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#118

Post by Godel_unicode »

It's interesting to me that this is happening in the same month that Microsoft made installing modern Python as easy as typing Python and then clicking "install". One more piece of evidence that Microsoft cares about developers more than Apple does.

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#119

Post by Wowfunhappy »

rgovostes wrote: post #86
ken wrote: post #76

Not surprising at all. It's become clear that what they've been doing with iOS all along is bootstrapping a new operating system. They started with Unix, not because Unix was optimal for what they wanted to do, but it's what they had and it worked well enough. Copland and Taligent and the rest failed because of Second-System Effect, which Apple was smart enough to avoid. (As RMS wrote in 1983, "Unix is not my ideal s…

I'm sure that others here are well familiar with other officially certified UNIX operating systems[1], but given many widely used Unix-like systems not on the list, I don't think Apple gains anything from the certification. Moreover, it probably is deleterious, forcing them to adhere to system designs that made sense in the 70s and 80s. 1: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

I'd be surprised if Apple spends all that much money/effort on official Unix certification, precisely because I doubt Apple would bother. How many customers are choosing macOS over something else because of the Unix certification? In a world where Linux exists?

(This discussion, of course, has nothing to do with whether or not macOS adheres to Unix principles or compatibility.)

Re: macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl

#120

Post by daveFNbuck »

Bonooru wrote: post #109
benatkin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. It's better for them to install it themselves so they know exactly what they're using, and so they type python for python 3 and not python3.

I'm gonna disagree on this one. When you're just starting, the installation process can be nontrivial and the terminal window is scary. Having less friction there makes it easier to start and build some confidence. Once you have some idea of what you're doing, you can realize that you want different versions of the language.

I think this is a better argument for Apple providing a package manager with the operating system so that installing python is as easy as typing "brew install python3". Then it'll be just as easy for newbies to learn less standard languages.
Post reply on HN