I get why Apple wants to remove it but it genuinely sucks. I can't imagine it costs them a lot to put it into maintenance mode and just support 20 years of macOS games and apps going forward. They want developers to fully move to ARM but older titles or software whose developers have moved on/passed will be lost to the sands of time.

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chii an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).

	▲	ryandrake an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That would be ideal, but given Apple's general hostility towards Open Source, it sounds extremely unlikely. I wonder what it would take to re-implement it. If it's "just software," I suppose there is a chance, not that I'm volunteering :)

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fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I imagine that the area it takes up on the chip is non-trivial and so it'd cost them a ton to continue to have it.

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rimunroe an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I thought Rosetta 2 was a purely software layer

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fwip an hour ago | parent [-]

Rosetta 2 is software, but there are design decisions made for the M-series chips that are specifically made to improve the ability of Rosetta to work in a performant way. The main one I'm aware of is the x86-TSO memory-ordering mode - most ARM chips don't support this, but the M-series have it so that Rosetta can toggle it on for x86 emulation.

I'm not sure what the total cost of these are, but it's not zero.

	▲	kbolino an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There's another big one, 4K page support. The MMU can be told to set up a virtual address space with smaller, x86-compatible 4096-byte memory pages instead of the default 16384-byte pages.
	▲	mrpippy 35 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Those are still needed for the Rosetta use-cases that are sticking around (old games, Linux binaries)

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wat10000 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s software.