[babaganooj]

I have this vague idea, which can be completely false, that porting software that runs on ARM64 Linux (which is what cloud servers use) to Mac ARM64 (which I think is BSD derived?) is not trivial. Or is it?

[saagarjha]

Depends on the kind of software. POSIX compatible C requires few, if any, source changes. Code that makes direct syscalls will need more work.

[DCKing]

It's worth pointing out that MacPorts still has a lot of modern tools and utilities working for PowerPC Macs. This is despite PowerPC Macs being 'officially' stuck on GCC 4.2 (unless you install newer... through MacPorts), ancient Mac OS X frameworks and barely any developers have a PowerPC machine at hand (because why would they).

[lmm]

In the general case it's not necessarily trivial, just like porting software from x86 linux to x86 mac is not necessarily trivial. For example your software might rely on some system interface that's done differently on those platforms, e.g. if you're using kprobes then it would take an effort to port that to use dtrace. And if we're talking about a GUI application then the framework it uses might not be first-class on mac, e.g. GTK only works in an X11-based way. But there are cases where it's as simple as pushing the compile button and getting out something working.