Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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I'm really curious how exactly they'll wind up phasing out Rosetta 2. They seem to be a bit coy about it:

> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.

However, that leaves much unsaid. Unmaintained gaming titles? Does this mean native, old macOS games? I thought many of them were already no longer functional by this point. What about Crossover? What about Rosetta 2 inside Linux?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

I wouldn't be surprised if they really do drop some x86 amenities from the SoC at the cost of performance, but I think it would be a bummer of they dropped Rosetta 2 use cases that don't involve native apps. Those ones are useful. Rosetta 2 is faster than alternative recompilers. Maybe FEX will have bridged the gap most of the way by then?

> However, that leaves much unsaid. Unmaintained gaming titles? Does this mean native, old macOS games? I thought many of them were already no longer functional by this point. What about Crossover? What about Rosetta 2 inside Linux?

Apple keeps trying to be a platform for games. Keeping old games running would be a step in that direction. Might include support for x86 games running through wine/apple game porting toolkit/etc

> Apple keeps trying to be a platform for games. Keeping old games running > would be a step in that direction. Might include support for x86 games > running through wine/apple game porting toolkit/etc

Well... They'd need to bring back 32-bit support also then. This is what killed most of my Mac-compatible Steam library....

And I do not see that happening.

They dropped rosetta 1, what makes you think they will keep supporting this one?

Rosetta 1 wasn't really useful for much because PowerPC was a dead platform by the time Apple switched off of it. Rosetta 2 is used for much more than just compatibility with old macOS apps.

Rosetta 1 was licenced third party technology back when the company wasn't exactly rolling in money.

https:/www.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit

If you have to pay the licensing fee again every time you want to release a new version of the OS, you've got a fiscal incentive to sunset Rosetta early.

Rosetta 2 was developed in-house.

Apple owns it, so there is no fiscal reason to sunset it early.

> Apple owns it, so there is no fiscal reason to sunset it early.

Except not having to pay to maintain it.

> so there is no fiscal reason to sunset it early.

Silicon (or verification thereof) isn't free.

I think they’re trying to maintain the stick for ordinary “Cocoa” app developers, but otherwise leave themselves the room to keep using the technology where it makes sense.

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