Hacker News Reader

I reckon they'd finally have to get R working natively on the new chip. I don't foresee Apple offering the fat binary support in the long term. It's probably only an intermediate solution for the transitional period. Also, does it mean the native version of R will finally work on the iPad? I know Apple doesn't allow compilers but there are a few examples like Pythonista and Apple's own Swift playground. It'd be cool to get R Studio on the iPad.

View on HN

Just to be clear, PPC-Intel fat/universal binaries are still supported even on Big Sur, the PPC portion is just ignored. I don't expect Intel-Arm binaries to go away any time soon.

I believe what you're really thinking of is Rosetta though. That, indeed, is sadly unlikely to be around forever. We have history as an indication of that.

Yes, you're right. I meant Rosetta2. It's good to have native binaries nevertheless.

When Apple transitioned from PowerPC to Intel the fat binary support (Rosetta) lasted 3 OS updates or about 3 years. Definitely won't be a super long term thing, but there's plenty of time I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com