Comment by brynet
3 years ago
The final fate of self-hosted QNX was super unfortunate, and poor decision making on the part of RIM/Blackberry. QNX completely dropped support for self-hosted QNX Neutrino development after 6.5 [0], and stopped distributing installation media ISOs with 6.6/7.0. Instead you needed to develop everything on macOS/Windows/Linux hosts, make custom specialized images using their published BSPs (Build Support Packages).
So no neutrino hosted compiler toolchain, no desktop. Oh yeah, they also completely killed off their full GUI desktop, the Photon microGUI in QNX 6.6. There was even a working port of Mozilla Firefox to it at some point. You could use all this freely with a hobbyist/non-commercial license in the early 2000s.
[0] http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/7.0.0/index.html#com.qnx....
As a casual outside observer, it seems to me that dropping self-hosted support was a very sensible move. They probably didn't want to spend resources on PC hardware support, particularly for laptops. And of course, a developer's PC doesn't just run development tools; it also has to handle things like connecting to VPNs and being manageable by company IT departments. Some people need accessibility accommodations (e.g. screen readers, magnifiers, or alternative input methods), and there's no reason to assume that this group doesn't (or couldn't) include some developers of niche embedded systems. The list goes on and on. Even desktop Linux doesn't do a great job on all these things, never mind a niche OS like QNX. So doing cross-development from Windows or macOS makes a lot of sense.
Edit to add: Just had a scary thought. What if Red Hat and whoever else is actually spending money on desktop Linux development applied the same logic to desktop Linux itself that I retroactively applied to self-hosted QNX? After all, non-developers don't use Linux, right? (I'm speculating that they'd make that assumption, not saying it's actually true.) And developers can work with Linux by connecting to a remote machine or running a VM on a "normal" (i.e. Windows or Mac) computer. Is there enough economic incentive to keep maintaining and improving desktop Linux that this won't happen? The death of desktop Linux wouldn't actually hurt me, as I mainly use Windows, but I'd still be sad.
> dropping self-hosted support was a very sensible move. They probably didn't want to spend resources on PC hardware support, particularly for laptops.
Self-hosting support doesn’t require PC hardware support. You totally can run your toolchain in a VM (every developer using WSL on Windows is doing it). In the past, I’ve put development environments in Docker containers - it makes it easier for people to get started, and on Windows or macOS that’s a VM too.
Making a system self-hosting is exposing it to a broader range of use cases which can help shake out bugs, limitations and performance issues which other use cases don’t. Even if you don’t strictly need it, I still think it is a good idea to maintain that support (even use it in your CI) unless doing so becomes unjustifiably expensive.