If its possible to compile & and sign iOS or MacOS apps that would be VERY useful in CI environments, but yeah hard to think of other killer command-line apps that only run on MacOS.

If they had good GUI support then some more things open up but nothing really essential. Garage Band has no equal in terms of ease of use, if you are into that sort of thing.

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MrAlex94 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Just in case anyone is wondering - this is already possible with Clang/LLVM and the work from Gregory Szorc: https://github.com/indygreg/apple-platform-rs/tree/main

The Firefox source tree has every tool available for cross-compilation from Linux → macOS, which is how Firefox is built for macOS.

	▲	henearkr 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The real deal-breaker is supporting the iOS app development. Which right now is only possible using XCode.

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mike_hearn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You can ship a fully signed and self-updating macOS app from Linux (or Windows) using my product Conveyor:

https://hydraulic.dev/

It has built in support for Electron, JVM, Flutter and even native apps (although of course then you still have to compile the native binaries on macOS yourself).

That also works the other way around. You can ship to Windows from Linux or macOS.

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henearkr 19 hours ago | parent [-]

No support for iOS though.

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mike_hearn 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, it's meant for portable desktop apps. You have to compile iOS apps on a Mac anyway so I'm not sure there'd be any demand for Conveyor's cross-building support for iOS apps.

	▲	henearkr 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"You have to compile iOS apps on a Mac anyway" Well, not if somebody finds a way to run the compilation elsewhere! Hence my comment! Right now, iOS dev requires to own a recent Mac machine, which is hell of expensive, and moreover needs to be renewed every few years... Completely unjustifiable...