Dear Experts,
Now that Macs have ARM processors - and in some cases, the exact same ARM processors as some iOS devices - why can't XCode's simulators run the same executables as the devices?
Specifically, I can build my iPad app and run it on my iPad, and I can then run the exact-same app on my Mac, using the "My Mac - designed for iPad" target. So in that case, the Mac OS does whatever mapping is needed to run the iOS executable. But if I want to run on the Mac simulating a particular iPad device, I need to build a different executable. (This obviously made sense when the Mac was x86 and the iPad was ARM.)
It's time consuming for me to create simulator builds mainly because of the third-party (i.e. mostly open-source) libraries that I link with, which need to be re-built for the simulator; often, cross-compiling these things is difficult enough to do once, let alone twice.
My only use for the simulator is to test on devices with different screen sizes than the physical devices that I have. Running in "designed for iPad" mode and resizing the window is almost sufficient, but it doesn't let me see the effect of notch / round-corner safe area insets, and the display scale may be different.
Thoughts anyone?