During the Platforms State of the Union on Tuesday, Andreas Wendker briefly mentioned Bitcode, describing it as an opportunity for future compiler optimizations to be applied to pre-existing applications.
Bitcode gives developers the ability to future proof their applications. The App Store on Mac OS X will be able to add support for new CPU features without developers having to resubmit their apps.
“With Bitcode for OS X, every subsequently submitted Mac App Store app will be future-proofed for this new platform. Granted, it does not solve the problem of backward compatibility with apps that aren’t on the store. That will still require some sort of solution like the Rosetta translator for PowerPC. Such a move would also give Apple the opportunity to put legacy (non-MAS) apps into their own sandbox, in order to provide many of the same platform security benefits enforced by the App Store’s limitations.”
Bitcode will also allow Mac OS X to run on top of any CPU architecture, including ARM or any custom designed Apple chip. The announcement of Metal for OS X also lays the ground work for getting rid of NVIDIA and AMD’s components in favour of first class graphics hardware, like we’ve seen in the iPhone and iPad. Check out Inertial Lemon’s full post on Medium here.
[via ParisLemon]
