On 23 Nov 2020, at 06:37, Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> wrote:
Just to add another monkey wrench: *I* have heard vauge rumors that Apple
might be thinking of moving away from x86_64 flavor processors (likely
ARM64). (I believe that iPads, iPhones, and iPods are all ARM based.)
Indeed, the first M1-based Macs were released two weeks ago and are able to
run iOS apps natively. Their marketing call it "Apple Silicon", but it's
a variant of the ARM-based aarch64[1]. I've had a Mac Mini in my shopping
cart since then, and this thread may finally tip the scales.
There's an emulation layer for running Intel binaries, but most developers
will ship so-called "fat" binaries[2] containing both aarch64-apple-darwin
and x86_64-apple-darwin instructions. These are fairly easy to create in
practice (via `CFLAGS = -arch`) and I don't think that it will be much of
hurdle to cross-compiling (compared to some other issues).
Cheers,
Tony
[1]
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=commitdiff;h=2593751ef276497e312d7c4ce7fd049614c7bf80
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_binary