Re: Ada on Apple's new procesors

["Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com>]

On 25/06/2020 12:03, Simon Wright wrote:

>> It does not and in any case, invoking this clause is a red herring
>> since as explained in the license, the concern and what's not allowed
>> is using an intermediate representation and feed it to a proprietary
>> (non-GPL-compatible) software to e.g. optimize it or further process
>> it.
> 
> Optikos has (at last) made clear his concerns about this: if it is
> indeed the case that Apple require App Store developers to deliver
> bitcode for further proprietary optimizations then there might be an
> issue.
> 
> Depends on whether LLVM IR (which I understand is logically equivalent
> to bitcode) can count as target code? I've seen it described as LLVM
> assembler ...
> 

Indeed. The only thing I've found so far is this:

https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/06/17/apples-biggest-developer-news-at-wwdc-that-nobodys-talking-about-bitcode/

Quote from near the top:

'This means that apps can automatically “take advantage of new processor
capabilities we might be adding in the future, without you re-submitting
to the store.”'

From the apple docs it links to at the top:

"Bitcode is an intermediate representation of a compiled program. Apps
you upload to App Store Connect that contain bitcode will be compiled
and linked on the App Store. Including bitcode will allow Apple to
re-optimize your app binary in the future without the need to submit a
new version of your app to the App Store. "

So, looks like he's right.