[PD-dev] Macs to transition to ARM processors

[IOhannes m zmölnig]

Am 22. Juni 2020 23:24:04 MESZ schrieb Dan Wilcox <danomatika at gmail.com>:
> Howdy all,
> 
> Apple announced today that it will transition from Intel to its own
> Arm processors.

oh.
i thought they made that switch in 2007.

> What this will bring is:
> 
> * Universal 2: x86_64 & arm fat binaries
> *
> 
> 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. 

hmm. why?
the original d_fat externals for Pd won't run on modern mac(hine)s at
all, as they contained ppc and i386, which are both unsupported these days.
yet the file format ( the container) stays the same, and it is totally
possible to have a d_fat that runs on ppc, ppc64 (an arch that was never
officially supported by PD), i386 and x86_64, so running on all
architectures ever supported by OSX (modulo system libraries...).
why not just add arm64 to that list?

so initially, I was going to rebuke the idea oft a d_fat2 format.

apple's labelling as "Universal 2" is a bit concerning though...

anyhow, I don't really see why apple should make a 2nd universal format.
iirc, "fat" is a technology from NextStep, so its well aged, and has
proven itself.
this of course is no reason to not drop it.

more important: can you (well: they) make money with a new format?
i'm having a hard time here to imagine how (but then: i'm not very good
in imagining how to make money in general).

i don't think there are still enough ppc users left for apple to care
about them.
thinkgs might be different with i386 though.

however, i guess the biggest issue is for the developers it's getting
really hard to create fat binaries that cover more architectures than
x86_64 and i-arm64.
that's because there's no reasonable toolchains available that allow you
to do so.
to build binaries for the new arm architecture, you probably need
XCode12, which - like XCode10 and XCode11 - won't support x86_64 (and
PPC has been dropped around XCode4, if my wikipedia foo is correct).
so the only way to produce fat binaries (that include mor ethan x86_&4
and amd64) is to have multiple build systems (parts of them unsupported
by now) and combine the artifacts into a single binary in a second step.

that sounds like a big enough hurdle to be a rather plump nudge for most
applications to support only "recent" architecture. no need to invent a
new format.

fgmasd
IOhannes

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