It's been terrible. Recently I had to reset my apple developer password, and they literally went "oh, you don't have any available apple hardware? Well.... We can still do it, but now it will take several days". And this is after 2FA through SMS. It's been a week now, and stil no update.
I honestly think apple and their excellent marketing and previous decent hardware alternatives, is one of the worst things to happen to consumer computing. It served the
"not Windows"-itch for a couple of decades, drawing driver and software manufacture towards a closed OS. Sometimes I think about what could have been. Hopefully getting there, just much more slowly.
Apple Silicon seems like a pretty decent current hardware alternative, for some use cases at least
> It served the "not Windows"-itch for a couple of decades
For many people it also served the the Apple II, and pre-Windows-3 Macintosh, and iPod, and iPhone, and iPad, and Apple Watch, and AirPod itches, etc..
Zig should be able to do it (the Zig toolchain can also be used to build regular C/C++/ObjC projects, not just Zig). But I think there's still work to be done to be able to build complete applications which could be uploaded to the Store. You also need a separate iOS SDK because this isn't bundled with Zig:
For debugging you'd still need a Mac and iOS device though, so for the regular development workflow using a Mac still makes sense. But for CI builds being able to build on Linux is pretty big deal.
If nothing else, the codebase for this has shown me how relatively painless it is to hook into external library code within DLLs from Python. I’ve been using Python for what I’d describe as normal work for years and didn’t know it was that simple, given its a use case I’ve not encountered yet in my work life.
As an experiment this is cool. As an excuse not to buy a Mac to do iPhone development this is insanely useless and a waste of time. Just buy a damn Mac if you are gonna do anything with iPhone development.
I tried it a couple of years ago and it was pure pain. Apple's vendor login forces to buy and use XCode.