Top all-time · #2431
High Caffeine Content
Personal blog · highcaffeinecontent.comprogramminghardware
High Caffeine Content is a personal blog at highcaffeinecontent.com about programming and hardware. Since 2014, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-05-18
- Bringing iOS Apps to MacOS Using Marzipanify5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-03-01
- (Don't Fear) the Reaper (2019)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-05-22
- Mpw – Building Classic Mac OS Apps in OS X4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-07-21
- Making Marzipan Apps Sing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-03-03
- Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-03-25
- Beyond the Checkbox with Catalyst and AppKit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-06-19
- The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-14
- Where Mac Catalyst Falls Short2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-17
- A Month with OpenAI's Codex2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-20
What Hacker News says?
https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin... This article appears to successfully statically translate arm64 binary into an x86_64 binary using bitcode.
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021”Submitted Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon as a story · 207 points
HN discussionActually, it seems I misremembered, and the bitcode representation is still only used for iOS [1]. Will be interesting to see if that changes with the next release of macOS. https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin...
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021”Submitted Translating an ARM iOS App to Intel macOS Using Bitcode as a story · 148 points
HN discussionApp uploads to the iOS store in the LLVM's own Bitcode format is a distant echo of the CPU ISA agnostic IR approach IBM employed at the time. Bitcode is transpiled down to the underlying CPU instructions via the static binary translation and optimisation, and the translation between Bitcode -> x86 or Bitcode -> ARM has been possible to do for some time: https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin...…
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “MIPS Becomes RISC-V”Submitted Bare Metal Raspberry Pi BASIC as a story · 69 points
HN discussionFor context, the current iPad Pro (still running last year's A-chip generation) benchmarks 50% faster than the Surface Pro X, and basic web browsing battery life tests peg it at around 13 hours battery life. Apple killing off 32-bit app support (and Carbon, QuickTime API, etc) is probably them preparing for an ARM transition. Any app that managed to make that transition is well-prepared for a pretty trivial "just ch…
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “MacBook Pro 16" 2019 Teardown”Submitted The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionOn one hand, an ARM powered mac would increase Apple's profitability by not having to pay Intel for processors, on the other hand there's a. the disruption and confusion an architecture switch would cause, and b. Apple's lack of interest in the laptop platform relative to Ipad pro and mobile. Someone demoed transpiling bitcode to x86_64, it seems going the other direction wouldn't be a big problem, it's stock clang:…
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results”Submitted Shortcuts for Mac as a story · 7 points
HN discussionBitcode is the bitstream file format used to encode the LLVM IR. LLVM IR itself is architecture independent (unless the code uses inline assembly, which is architecture specific): https://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html clang compilers (or other LLVM based language/compiler frontends) generate the LLVM IR, apply optimisation passes and run the LLVM IR through the architecture specific backend that transforms the LLVM IR…
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “Windows for Arm on M1 Mac Successfully Virtualized”Submitted Where Mac Catalyst Falls Short as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI think the tradeoff with the Toolbox is that positioning controls with relative coordinates, and updating views when scrolling etc, is a huge PITA since you have to do it in application code – for example, I'm not aware of many classic Toolbox applications that had bottom window status bars before that required relative positioning. A few early applications just assumed 512x342 fullscreen (i.e. MacPaint.) On the po…
Comment linking /blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbon-and-building-Classic-Mac-OS-apps-in-OS-X
on “A peculiarity of the X Window System: Windows all the way down”Submitted Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'd follow him for the technical discussion, not for his analysis of where Apple is taking this. He seems to take a quite extreme view on macOS basically being old and busted and it being time to throw it out, and I feel he either ignores or misrepresents arguments that don't quite agree with him. As one example, he has a post where he makes a "Good Mac Citizen" except it's really not one at all: https://www.highcaf…
Comment linking /blog/20190302-Making-Marzipan-Apps-Sing
on “What to Expect from Marzipan”Submitted Intel Virtualization and Apple Silicon as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's a plan for that. https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin...
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “What is wrong with all those AArch64 desktops?”Submitted Mpw – Building Classic Mac OS Apps in OS X as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's not every app as far as I know because I believe you can opt out of BitCode, but this would be widely the case with exceptions: https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/06/17/apples-biggest-devel... https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin... (other direction but clearly demonstrative of what apple can do here)
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “Osborning the Mac, or not”Submitted Beyond the Checkbox with Catalyst and AppKit as a story · 3 points
HN discussionafaiu this doesn't go back as far but it spans back to Classic Mac OS: https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbo...
Comment linking /blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbon-and-building-Classic-Mac-OS-apps-in-OS-X
on “Carmack on Apple successfully migrating from 68k to PPC to x86 to ARM”Submitted Why Apple Needs iPad Apps on the Mac as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis article really got into some specific complaints of the software. No advanced background processes, poor windowing, no permission to use JIT in apps, a better file browser, better audio/video streams handling... https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20240514-The-iPad-P...
Comment linking /blog/20240514-The-iPad-Pro-Manifesto-(2024-Edition)
on “iPad Pro M4 review: ludicrously good hardware that's total overkill for most”Submitted Bringing iOS Apps to MacOS Using Marzipanify as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFound an accompanying article: https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190522-(Dont-Fear...
Comment linking /blog/20190522-(Dont-Fear)-The-Reaper
on “NeXTSTEP 4.0”Submitted Making Marzipan Apps Sing as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWe kind of have it, except it does not seem to have taken off and has been relegated to a second-class citizen at best. I am talking about LLVM Bitcode[0] – when the binary product (a executable or .o/.a files) is shipped in the LLVM IR representation and then is «AOT»'d into the final product (a final executable) that can, for instance, take advantage of the latest ISA features (armv9, Zen23, POWER18 or new RISC-V…
Comment linking /blog/20190518-Translating-an-ARM-iOS-App-to-Intel-macOS-Using-Bitcode
on “ARM or x86? ISA Doesn’t Matter”Submitted Bringing iOS Apps to MacOS Using Marzipanify as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMPW is probably the way, it emulates just enough to run the classic build tools on OSX https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbo...
Comment linking /blog/20150124-MPW,-Carbon-and-building-Classic-Mac-OS-apps-in-OS-X
on “Like the macOS Dock but for macOS System 7”Submitted A Month with OpenAI's Codex as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
