Apple Silicon / M1 Port Planned For GCC 12

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Silicon / M1 Port Planned For GCC 12

Developers are hoping for next year's GCC 12 release they will have Apple AArch64 support on Darwin in place for being able to support Apple Silicon -- initially the M1 SoC -- on macOS with GCC...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-12-Apple-M1-Port-Plan

[tildearrow]

In before anti-Apple comments.

(not an Apple fan)

[kpedersen]

There are more i386 machines in active circulation than Apple-specific ARM. Does this generally mean support will only ever be tier 3 at best?

That is an awful lot of hype for a tier 3 platform.

[scottishduck]

There are more i386 machines in active circulation than Apple-specific ARM. Does this generally mean support will only ever be tier 3 at best?

That is an awful lot of hype for a tier 3 platform.

There’s probably over a billion Apple silicon devices in use today. I somehow doubt there’s that many i386 systems in “active circulation”

[kpedersen]

There’s probably over a billion Apple silicon devices in use today. I somehow doubt there’s that many i386 systems in “active circulation”

I'm still not so sure. Think of all those i.e, hospital thin clients. Many still on Windows XP. Then in Russia, China and other countries where Apple is not quite so desirable.

I will never get the stats but I am fairly sure there are more old Windows XP installs running on that era hardware than Mac installs.

[Developer12]

If apple's M1 (and later) silicon takes off it doesn't really matter whether there's a lot of devices around today. It doesn't look like apple will be switching back to x86 any time soon so having this heavy lifting done may be a wise investment. Not to mention this will probably benefit asahi linux a lot and there's a lot of excitement for that, even from the linux head-honcho himself.

[jabl]

I'm still not so sure. Think of all those i.e, hospital thin clients. Many still on Windows XP. Then in Russia, China and other countries where Apple is not quite so desirable.

I will never get the stats but I am fairly sure there are more old Windows XP installs running on that era hardware than Mac installs.

I'm sure there's lots of hospital thin clients, POS systems, etc. running 32-bit XP. But quite hard say they are relevant targets for GCC.

You can see the current list of primary and secondary platforms along with criteria for them at https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-12/criteria.html . I think there's quite a lot of historical inertia in that list. E.g. i686-apple-darwin is a secondary platform but x86_64-apple-darwin isn't, although 32-bit x86 was a rather short-lived Apple platform before they switched to 64-bit x86.

[stiiixy]

See the M1X news

[discordian]

functions and other fundamental differences, largely in the name of Apple M1 security enhancements requiring additional compiler alterations to yield working/supported code.

In case someone figured "WTF", the changes are to adhere to function call conventions/ABI for interfacing with the system libraries. Has zero to do with the hardware implementation.

[Markopolo]

In case someone figured "WTF", the changes are to adhere to function call conventions/ABI for interfacing with the system libraries. Has zero to do with the hardware implementation.

That was definitely me, appreciate the clarification. Here I thought they had added a whole bunch of instructions beyond Arm v8.x or whatever they’re on.