Anyone know what rewriting for M1 actually entails? Guessing maybe you just recompile all your libraries for M1 and fix any errors and warnings that crop up.
Having said that some consideration to keep in mind:
- audio code needs to be optimized for real time thread constrains. Many optimizations usually made by vectorizing rather than threading that would've lead to locks and synchronization not always possible for real-time processing. So not all SIMD code can be compiled just by changing a flag.
- machine specific code. While rare. Some companies still got such code for various reasons. And needs more complex transition.
- Not all companies were able to obtain DTK. We for example, got our first M1 machine 3 weeks ago.
- Backward support. While we'd like to have universal builds, musicians use their systems for years. We still support 10.7. With Big Sur Apple seems to break SHA1 signs making builds from Big Sur work reliably only on 10.11 or newer. (The first release to support SHA256 codesigns) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rock_artist
Basically, just recompile for the M1. For the rare apps that have some assembly or cpu-specific intrinsics (e.g. for vectorization in math-heavy code), you'll need to port those to ARM64 as well, but that should be very rare.
Atomics can be a pain point as well. The strong memory model of x86 tolerates sloppy use of atomics so bugs can easily fly under the radar, until the code is re-compiled for a weaker memory model like ARMs and suddenly you have a nightmare web of race conditions to deal with.
IDEA contains a JRE which has a JIT compiler. This is of course entirely cpu-specific, so had to be completely redone. OFC, ARM JITs for java already existed so they just had to ship to one of those.
Porting PyPy is harder than just re-running the compiler, because PyPy contains a few big architecture-dependent "details", like the JIT compiler and the foreign function interfaces (CFFI and ctypes). More details found at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25591695
Well except that they can benefit from many years of Linux (and Windows) on AArch64, as a result of which OpenJDK is already ready and optimized AArch64.
jensv|5 years ago
- audio code needs to be optimized for real time thread constrains. Many optimizations usually made by vectorizing rather than threading that would've lead to locks and synchronization not always possible for real-time processing. So not all SIMD code can be compiled just by changing a flag.
- machine specific code. While rare. Some companies still got such code for various reasons. And needs more complex transition.
- Not all companies were able to obtain DTK. We for example, got our first M1 machine 3 weeks ago.
- Backward support. While we'd like to have universal builds, musicians use their systems for years. We still support 10.7. With Big Sur Apple seems to break SHA1 signs making builds from Big Sur work reliably only on 10.11 or newer. (The first release to support SHA256 codesigns) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rock_artist
roblabla|5 years ago
jsheard|5 years ago
Tuna-Fish|5 years ago
jensv|5 years ago
JosephRedfern|5 years ago
microtonal|5 years ago