[PD-dev] Macs to transition to ARM processors

[Dan Wilcox]

Howdy all,

Apple announced today that it will transition from Intel to its own Arm processors. What this will bring is:

* Universal 2: x86_64 & arm fat binaries
* Rosetta 2: emulation layer from x86_64 to arm

For Pd, this means that current binaries will most likely *run* but who knows how the performance will be good for realtime DSP. OTOH, they did demo a game and some virtualization support so it seems they have focused on making things run as well as they can.

Building Pd itself for macOS arm should be relatively easy, just a different arch target. For externals, this would may require an additional fat lib type, perhaps dfat_2? Note, I believe the distinction will be important for us since we still have "Universal 1" builds. As with the Pd core, updating pd-lib-builder should also be relatively easy by adding the new arch targets, depending on what they are.

For deken, this means recompiling and uploading the new fat type.

I don't imagine it will be possible to have a "fatter lib" which supports ppc, x86, x86_64, & arm. I believe the writing is on the wall for the eventual need for a build system newer then OS X 10.6.

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika <http://twitter.com/danomatika>
danomatika.com <http://danomatika.com/>
robotcowboy.com <http://robotcowboy.com/>



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-dev/attachments/20200622/0853ef51/attachment.html>