@lassoan thanks for the exec() suggestion, it seems to work. See this PR.
@mohammed_alshakhas It’s great that a 10 year old mac is still working well for you. It’s also much appreciated that you took the time to report this issue so we could address it. It happens that I’m the only Slicer core developer who uses a mac for my day to day work and I didn’t happen to see the issue.
On the bigger picture of supporting Apple in the future, we’ll certainly try but there could very well be issues that are out of our control.
Just to echo @mohammed_alshakhas here, I’m Mac-based as well for all my slicer work. I would very much like to see slicer continue as a full cross-platform application. While I’ve only been able to contribute by fixing a small bug here or there, I’ll try to help out where I can.
Slicer will not be an outlier. If Apple makes open-source/cross-platform 3D application development practically impossible then not just Slicer but a whole lot of other applications will disappear from Apple devices, so many people will have to switch to Windows or Linux. But this is highly unlikely to happen. Apple will try to push everyone towards adopting their proprietary technologies, but just not that hard to make developers leave their platforms in large numbers.
Most probably cross-platform software will be just a bit more glitchy and more limited on macOS compared to other platforms, and you may not have access to features, such as GPU-accelerated processing and deep learning, augmented/virtual reality, etc. for a few years. I would expect then bridging toolkits will appear that can translate open interfaces to proprietary Apple technology and/or Apple will start support some open interfaces.