DMD support for Apples new silicon

[Christian Köstlin]

On 10.01.21 15:50, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Sunday, 10 January 2021 at 14:22:25 UTC, Christian Köstlin wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> are there any plans on supporting Apples new ARM silicon with DMD or 
>> would this be something for ldc?
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Christian
> 
> Hello Christian,
> 
> LDC since 1.24+ support cross-compiling to Apple Silicon.
> Here is how to build for it on Big Sur.
> 
> 
> 1. Download ldc2-1.24.0-osx-x86_64.tar.xz (or later version)
>     from this page: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases
> 
> 2. Unzip where you want, and put the bin/ subdirectory in your PATH envvar
> 
>     This will give you the ldc2 and dub command in your command-line, 
> however they won't work straight away in Catalina/Big Sur because of 
> lacking notarization.
> 
> 3. (optional) In this case, in Finder, right-click + click "Open" on the 
> bin/dub and bin/ldc2 binaries since it is not notarized software, and 
> macOS will ask for your approval first. Once you've done that, dub and 
> ldc2 can be used from your Terminal normally.
> 
> 4. Type 'ld' in Terminal, this will install the necessary latest 
> XCode.app if it isn't already. That is a painful 10 gb download in 
> general. You can also install Xcode from the App Store. People target 
> Big Sur arm64 from Catalina or Big Sur usually.
> 
> 5. You can target normal x86_64 (Rosetta 2) with:
> 
>        ldc2 <params>
>        dub <params>
> 
> 6. If you want to target arm64, adapt the SDK path in etc/ldc2.conf with 
> your actual Xcode macOS11.0 path, and then use 
> -mtriple=arm64-apple-macos to cross-compile.
> 
>        ldc2 -mtriple=arm64-apple-macos <params>
>        dub -a arm64-apple-macos <params>
> 
> Debugging and notarization is a whole another topic then.

Good news!
I was hoping for support in ldc, but dmds super fast compile times would 
be very welcome. I guess it's more work to put an ARM backend there.

Kind regards,
Christian