Offtopic, but I'm distracted by the opening example:

> After all, you don’t want to be building your iPhone app on literal iPhone hardware.

iPhones are impressively powerful, but you wouldn't know it from the software lockdown that Apple holds on it.

Example: https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/iphones/iphone-16-is-actual...

There's a reason people were clamoring for Apple to make ARM laptops/desktops for years before Apple finally committed.

I do not think I like this author...

> A critical piece of history here is to understand the really stupid way in which GCC does cross compiling. Traditionally, each GCC binary would be built for one target triple. [...] Nobody with a brain does this ^2

You're doing GCC a great disservice by ignoring its storied and essential history. It's over 40 years old, and was created at a time where there were no free/libre compilers. Computers were small and slow. Of course you wouldn't bundle multiple targets in one distribution.

LLVM benefitted from a completely different architecture and starting from a blank slate when computers were already faster and much larger, and was heavily sponsored by a vendor that was innately interested in cross-compiling: Apple. (Guess where LLVM's creator worked for years and lead the development tools team)

A more pertinent (if dated) example would be "you don't want to be building your GBA game on literal Game Boy Advance hardware".

iPhones have terrible heat dispersion compared to even a fanless computer like a macbook air. You get a few minutes at full load before thermal throttling kicks in, so you could do the occasional build of your iPhone app on an iPhone but it'd be pretty terrible as a development platform.

At work we had some benchmarking suites that ran on physical devices and even with significant effort put into cooling them they spent more time sleeping waiting to cool off than actually running the benchmarks.