Where the hell is the opcode documentation for the M1 processor? It implements the ARM v8.5-A instruction set, so you need to find the documentation for that at arm.com. Basically ARM v8 will be enough, the differences in the .n variants are unlikely to be important. Having said that, my recent experience with the ARM docs is not brilliant so you might find other unofficial docs with better explanations. Does apple still maintain the C libraries MacOS inherited from Unix and if so where can I find the documentation on it? man pages are available. (You might like to refer to POSIX specs as well as Apple's man pages.)

info page on our site that happens to support account creation Can this account be deleted?

No-one who knows Apple's future plans is allowed to post here.

Keychain doesn't work properly when you're connected using ssh. I believe that unlocking the keychain requires the plain text of your macOS login password, so it can't possibly work over ssh. It's not obvious why xcodebuild would need access to the keychain, but there are a billion other non-obvious things involved here. Try running this immediately before invoking xcodebuild: security unlock-keychain

Correct, you're not missing anything.

Try changing the C code to use arc4random() instead of rand(), and see what the slowdown is. If C-using-arc4random() is similar to the speed of the swift code, then I think we can say that the speed difference is because Swift's float.random is using the arc4random algorithm, or similar. But if the C code is still faster, there must be other issues involved. As for how to fix your problem - you can, of course, call the C rand() function from Swift using suitable bridging. Do be aware of the well-known limitations of rand() if you choose to do this. If I were trying to generate lots of pseudo-random numbers very fast, I'd search for SIMD (NEON) code to do it.

Switching from for in to a while < loop drastically reduces the execution time. The other thing you're doing there is changing from .append to [idx]. Do you have optimisation enabled? Any other build settings to fiddle with?

People leave critical reviews for my apps and I don't know about them so the app rating goes down. Knowing about the bad reviews will not stop the rating from going down. Knowing about the bad reviews, and then replying to them, will also not stop the rating from going down. My advice regarding App Store reviews is still “don’t look at your reviews”. Nothing good can result from reading them, and it can be very bad for your mental health. This advice predates the reply feature. I did reconsider when that feature was added, but on reflection I think “don’t read the reviews” is still the right choice. I guess that if you have read a bad review it could be cathartic to reply saying “Idi0t user”, but that doesn’t stop the rating from going down, and it’s still less healthy for you than not reading in the first place. I suppose you might imagine that someone posts a review saying “app doesn’t have feature X, 1 star”, and you can reply saying “it does have feature X, press the button that says X”, and then they will read that reply, understand their mistake, and change the rating to 5 stars. Realistically, though, that’s going to happen about 0.0000% of the time. Most likely, after posting the initial review they will have deleted the app, and their idiotic review will remain there unchanged.

No

It should never reset to zero.

where do I find these files? According to "man xip": --expand <input-file> Expands the archive into the current working directory.

You can certainly use C++, in XCode, for macOS (or iOS) development. My current project is 85% C++, 15% objC++. Before Swift, it was really very easy to combine C++ with objective-C in the same file - they refer to that as "objective C++". But that's not possible with Swift. You can combine Swift with C++ in the same project, in different source files, but I think you need to use only C semantics where they communicate. The best approach will depend on the nature of the app you want to make. To port from Windows, you'll probably be able to keep the non-UI code unchanged in C++, but you'll need to completely re-write the UI. If you have the patience, it may be best to start by ignoring the C++ aspect and learn how to build a GUI using SwiftUI. Do a few tutorials, until you understand what is possible and are getting familiar with the terminology etc. Then, think about how you might divide a project between the different languages. At this point I don't think I'd recommend using much objC. Apple are introducing a few "Swift-only" APIs now. It could be more convenient than Swift in a few cases but they will be rare and it's another thing to learn. Good luck!

I believe that’s not possible. (There is a similar situation with an iPhone and wifi-only iPad.) What you can do is send location data from the iPhone using Bluetooth LE using an app such as “LE GPS”. (Note LE, not classic Bluetooth.) But the Mac (or wifi-onlt iPad) doesn’t understand that natively, so each map app on the Mac needs to add support for receiving it. I did that for one of my apps, but I believe approximately zero people have ever used the feature.

The “private client” should hold the licence, shouldn’t they?

Yes, there are awkward issues with links, but (a) there is no solution that does what you hope for in every case, and (b) making any change will break some existing code. In code like your first sample, you cannot assume anything about what getwd() returns. In paranoid code, e.g. anything with security implications, you should be even more cautious because you should assume that someone else has moved a link while you weren't looking.