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About the Rosetta Translation Environment

developer.apple.com

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Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#211

Post by paxys »

reaperducer wrote: post #161
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #143

I've been using Macs at work for a long time, but sadly this will mark the end of that era. In particular, this limitation on Rosetta rules out an ARM-based Mac for work: > Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms My job requires me to use a piece of proprietary Windows-only software for a large portion of my work. If I can't use this software I can't do my job. Currently I run it in VMware Fusi…

Tim Cook says new Intel Macs are coming out this year. If you can convince your company to buy you one, you should be good until 2030. Not being able to do your job would be enough for even my craptastic company to buy me a new machine.

2030 is a stretch. Apple has generally supported new Mac hardware for 5-7 years, and my guess is the timeline is only going to get shorter for Intel-based Macs going forward, considering their resources are going to be disproportionately allocated to the newer versions.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#212

Post by scarface74 »

rz2k wrote: post #71

Does anyone have any insight into the business logistics involved in a transition like this? I presume Apple has done maintenance on transitioning desktop OS X to ARM as an option for a very long time. How many years ago would they have had to decide that was the direction they were going to make it reality? 2015? How many people would have been working on it? How many billions of dollars? How does the cost of develo…

Institutional investors can’t know more than retail outside investors. That would be illegal. Why would they need to make any public disclosures? They don’t publish margins per segment.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#213

Post by briandear »

ArgyleSound wrote: post #193
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s already happening. macOS Bug Sur (Apple’s wording) enforces a read only system partition, which cannot be easily disabled or mounted as rw.

Can you not go into recovery mode and turn off all the system integrity features like you always could?

Yes.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#214

Post by snowwrestler »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #143

I've been using Macs at work for a long time, but sadly this will mark the end of that era. In particular, this limitation on Rosetta rules out an ARM-based Mac for work: > Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms My job requires me to use a piece of proprietary Windows-only software for a large portion of my work. If I can't use this software I can't do my job. Currently I run it in VMware Fusi…

That line just means you can’t run an emulator on top of an emulator, which makes sense. Performance would suck.

What will happen instead is that companies like VMware will release emulators that run natively on Apple chips. (Rather than trying to run on top of Rosetta.) However, Intel Windows performance might still suck in those. Remains to be seen.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#215

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jjcon wrote: post #176
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking solely for myself, I do not intend to go with this experiment after using Macs for 16 years and change. I have found that with a few rough edges, Windows 10 and WSL fulfills my dev needs, and except for the Apple apps Logic and Final Cut Pro, virtually all my software is cross platform. Besides, I can use Ableton and Adobe Premiere which I also already "own."

> I do not intend to go with this experiment I’m sure they lost people when they switched off of ppc too but just like last time Apple is playing the long game. Intel just can’t keep up anymore.

Intel can't (maybe). AMD can. In fact right now, AMD doesn't even have to keep up, because it's substantially out in front.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#216

Post by scarface74 »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #185
ryanianian wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many billions of dollars? Rounding-error-sized marginal costs. Even if you don't plan on pivoting architectures, it's good practice to write as much code as possible without assembly/intrinsics. If you're writing standards-compliant C/C++/Objective-C/Swift/* it's not a huge burden to change architectures. They also have past-experience with such transitions, so hopefully they kept the "keep the code portable" m…

Probably a big opportunity cost though. It surely takes a lot of time from senior engineers to port the software, figure out this whole translation system, etc...

The story was that it took two engineers to keep OS X compatible with Intel when they were on PPC.

It took only a small company - Connectix - to make a better 68K emulator that worked perfectly with PPC/Classic MacOS than Apple could.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#217

Post by fulafel »

LeSaucy wrote: post #65
bjpirt wrote: post #37

Having big flashbacks to the switch from PPC to x86 here. Rosetta worked relatively smoothly during that transition so fingers crossed it will be ok here too. Though with Docker support on the mac already being a second class citizen to running on Linux I wonder if a lot of devs will stop using macs for dev

Highly unlikely Apple would cede the software engineering market for a competitor to step in. Almost everyone in my company would prefer to have a MacBook vs a Thinkpad/Dell/etc if given the choice.

What % of your devs are running Windows vs Linux on those?

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#218

Post by qalmakka »

snowwrestler wrote: post #214
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #143

I've been using Macs at work for a long time, but sadly this will mark the end of that era. In particular, this limitation on Rosetta rules out an ARM-based Mac for work: > Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms My job requires me to use a piece of proprietary Windows-only software for a large portion of my work. If I can't use this software I can't do my job. Currently I run it in VMware Fusi…

That line just means you can’t run an emulator on top of an emulator, which makes sense. Performance would suck. What will happen instead is that companies like VMware will release emulators that run natively on Apple chips. (Rather than trying to run on top of Rosetta.) However, Intel Windows performance might still suck in those. Remains to be seen.

Maybe with this growing interest in ARM desktops someone could consider continuing that project that was going around a few years ago of integrating QEMU and WINE. Some old x86 Win32 apps would probably run fine under, like they do on Microsoft's emulator.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#219

Post by qalmakka »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #102
rz2k wrote: post #71

Does anyone have any insight into the business logistics involved in a transition like this? I presume Apple has done maintenance on transitioning desktop OS X to ARM as an option for a very long time. How many years ago would they have had to decide that was the direction they were going to make it reality? 2015? How many people would have been working on it? How many billions of dollars? How does the cost of develo…

Apple already supports ARM so they have the whole toolchain, most of their operating system, and many frameworks ported. Most of the heavy lifting was done in Project Purple (aka the first iPhone). Porting from PPC to x86 was arguably more difficult as a lot more of the framework code had endianness assumptions baked in.

As Steve Jobs himself said in the famous Mac Intel keynote, Mac OS X ran on Intel from day one, "just in case". After all Darwin has always supported x86, and NEXTSTEP ran fine on x86 too, so probably it was not that difficult from a core system standpoint migrating to x86.

Re: About the Rosetta Translation Environment

#220

Post by [deleted] »

wmf wrote: post #147
bjpirt wrote: post #37

Having big flashbacks to the switch from PPC to x86 here. Rosetta worked relatively smoothly during that transition so fingers crossed it will be ok here too. Though with Docker support on the mac already being a second class citizen to running on Linux I wonder if a lot of devs will stop using macs for dev

People weren't running PowerPC VMs (besides Classic which was dropped in 10.5) so they didn't notice the loss of that functionality. Many people are running x86 VMs today which won't work on ARM.

[deleted]
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