M4 is amazing hardware held up by a sub-par OS. One of the biggest bottlenecks when compiling software on a Mac is notarization, where every executable you compile causes a HTTP call to Apple. In addition to being a privacy nightmare, this causes the configure step in autoconf based packages to be excruciatingly slow.

They added always-connected DRM to software development, neat

Exactly. They had promised to make notarization opt-out but reneged.

Does this mean that compilation fails without an internet connection? If so, that's horrifying.

Yes, of course it does, isn't it nice?

Even better if you want to automate the whole notarization thing you don't have a "nice" notarize-this-thing command that blocks until its notarized and fails if there's an issue, you send a notarization request... and wait, and then you can write a nice for/sleep/check loop in a shell script to figure out whether the notarization finished and whether it did so successfully. Of course from time to time the error/success message changes so that script will of course break every so often, have to keep things interesting.

Xcode does most of this as part of the project build - when it feels like it that is. But if you want to run this in CI its a ton a additional fun.

None of this comment is true.

Compilation works fine without notarization. It isn't called by default for the vast majority of complications. It is only called if you submit to an App Store, or manually trigger notarization.

The notarization command definitely does have the wait feature you claim it doesn't: `xcrun notarytool ... --wait`.

Notarization isn’t called for the vast majority of builds on the vast majority of build systems.

Your local dev builds don’t call it or require it.

It’s only needed for release builds, where you want it notorized (required on iOS, highly recommended for MacOS). I make a Mac app and I call the notarization service once or twice a month.

Wait wait wait wait wait. So you're saying that a configure script that compiles a 5-line test program (and does this 50 times) to check if a feature is present or a compiler flag works... will have to call out to Apple for permission to do so??

Ugh. Disgusting. So glad I stopped using macOS years ago. (Even if this isn't actually true... still glad I stopped using Apple's we-know-better-than-you OS years ago.)

It is amazing to me that people put up with this garbage and don't use an OS that respects them more.