Dear Tim

[-hh]

Depends.

Apple actually killed distributed compilation in the last version of XCode, so you can't send compiling to servers any more. If Apple kills the Mac Pro, developers can't even build Mini clusters to augment XCode any more.

On the other hand, Apple is allowed to cheat. No reason they can't have a bunch of generic PCs running OS X. That's exactly what they did while they were writing OS X for Intel.

Another possibility is that Apple makes it 'easy' for iOS developers through some sort of Cloud-ification ... this could be an "Included in the Package" sweetener that's part of Apple's "Developer ID Card" (which will probably carry an annual fee) bit that's going to be coming to the Mac.

BTW, thanks for the correction on the 500MHz G4; my recollection had been that some quantity of them had supposedly shipped before it was canned.

Except most tasks are a real pain to be done in "the cloud". I work on a Mac Pro and use a cluster for scientific research, and... ... if its at all like what I deal with, and what I've heard from other software engineers, the workstation is still a very critical part of the computing toolkit. And if Apple needs a workstation internally, they probably will just want to build them and sell them to us too.

That's kind of the direction I was thinking. My expectation is that Apple could work out these headaches for whatever they want to roll-out and have it end up being basically as user-friendly as the photo sharing bit currently is on iOS.

Of course, the big difference I see is that Apple's not going to be stuck with some slow & thin pipe to their own server farm. I already see this when watching Apple's bloated website load its pages...it probably appears to be just fine while they're working on it in-house on a fast machine & fast connection.

Apple is heavily invested in OpenCL (among other high-end technologies).

Anybody at Apple doing OpenCL needs what I need: a Mac Pro with a fat GPU.

I've been monitoring for news on Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL...its important stuff to the higher end of the power scale...but that frontier has seemed to be pretty quiet, for far too long.


-hh

 

[goMac]

Another possibility is that Apple makes it 'easy' for iOS developers through some sort of Cloud-ification ... this could be an "Included in the Package" sweetener that's part of Apple's "Developer ID Card" (which will probably carry an annual fee) bit that's going to be coming to the Mac.

Yeah, sadly the support wasn't just yanked out of XCode, it was yanked out of the entire compiler toolchain. The optimization direction they've gone in requires all the code to be on the same machine.

To be honest, cloud compiling is kind of a mixed bag. The overhead of sending it up to the cloud is usually more than the time it would take to compile on your machine. When everything is on the same network, it's more do-able.

Commonly you usually have a build server that has all your code and builds it all remotely, but that's usually one high powered machine, like a Mac Pro.

 

[derbothaus]

Am I missing something here?

Apple sells one or 2 options for cards every 2 years or so (less than 5% of available releases). Nothing else is supported but drivers are contained with references. Some worked on and some with a text entry for product code. Most are used for mobile consumer stuff (everything not Mac Pro). I don't know if that helps or not but it sounded like you were alluding to some kind of choice and Apple holding out. There is no choice, really. They just don't seem to care to cleanup the driver bundles. Good for us.

 

[deconstruct60]

Depends.

Apple actually killed distributed compilation in the last version of XCode, so you can't send compiling to servers any more. If Apple kills the Mac Pro, developers can't even build Mini clusters to augment XCode any more.

Actually you can .... it just isn't as well integrated into XCode anymore.


Distcc appears to have gotten caught up in the "death to GCC, long live LLVM " movement Apple is on. The current "don't worry be happy" explanation is that LLVM is soooo fast you don't need distributed/parallel builds.

http://prod.lists.apple.com/archives/xcode-users/2012/Mar/msg00048.html
"... Distributed builds using distcc are deprecated as of Xcode 4.2 ... Moving your project to the Apple LLVM compiler will take advantage of the latest advancements in accelerating build times. ... "

Looking through the open source distcc READMEs (http://opensource.apple.com/source/distcc/) it appears Apple kept the bundled distcc forked for an extended period of time to cause substantive drift to settle in as well between where the GPL version was and Apple's forked mod with slightly tighter XCode integration. Shades of other gcc alignment issues over the years.

distcc is somewhat coupled to gcc so if one goes (gcc). The other is likely to get tossed out as collateral damage.

This will probably turn out like FCPX ... it is a feature that will eventually reappear after having been rewritten from scratch (or jumping onto a distributed build system Apple likes better that doesn't run a higher likelihood of flipping to GPL 3 at some point. ) . LLVM is substantially faster in most cases, but eventually people will start to throw larger and larger code bases with funky complexity at it too. Everybody cannot just compile iOS apps all day.


Apple deprecated "Apple" Java and jumped on the openJDK bandwidth. There just wasn't a smooth transition from "old" solution to new solution (still haven't polished off Java7 yet. ). Similar transition likely here too.