Topic: Apple silicon support

Hi,

When will Simply Fortran have support for Apple Silicon? How soon after the first products with the new chips come out?

Thanks,
Ranjith

  • jeff
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Re: Apple silicon support

At this time, many libraries on which our development environment depends do not work on Apple's ARM64 architecture yet (specifically GTK+).  Additionally, the GNU compiler won't support Apple chips until the 11.0 release series.  We might be able to ship preview versions of the compiler before then (which we normally try to avoid).

I would guess it will be months after the release of ARM64-powered Macs that we'd have a release ready.  1st quarter 2021 might be too optimistic.

Jeff Armstrong
Approximatrix, LLC

3 Reply by ranjith (edited by ranjith 2020-09-18 14:43:37)

Re: Apple silicon support

Thanks for the reply.

Will current versions of Simply Fortran and gfortran work with Apple Silicon under Rosetta, if not natively? Are you testing with macOS 11 beta?

Thanks,
Ranjith

  • jeff
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Re: Apple silicon support

It should work fine under Rosetta, but we don't have an ARM64 Apple developer system right now.  I can't say for sure.  We have not started testing with macOS 11 yet, but there is no reason to think it wouldn't work.

Jeff Armstrong
Approximatrix, LLC

Re: Apple silicon support

I downloaded the experimental build of SF for the M1 processor three days ago to run on an M1 Mac Mini. I'm still in the process of getting acquainted with SF's build process, so haven't really stressed the package. I will note that the M1 processor is fast.

  • jeff
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Re: Apple silicon support

Our Apple M1 build should be working.  We're confident that the development environment should be functioning fine for the most part, though porting to the M1 did reveal some significant memory bugs that had been effecting Intel macOS and GNU/Linux ports.  I'm guessing there are still a few hidden in our code that are only manifesting themselves on M1 Macs. 

We currently ship an unreleased Fortran compiler version that has added support for M1 processors and macOS.  We plan to switch to mainline GNU Fortran builds as soon as the patches make it into the mainline tree.  I believe the plan is to have full Apple Silicon support by GNU Fortran 11.0, which should be released this summer.

The debugger is currently an issue.  We're planning to transition to using Apple's lldb present on the system, but the final decision hasn't yet been made. We'll be using a popular shim that allows lldb to appear as gdb to the controlling program.

Anyone trying the Apple Silicon port is encouraged to report any problems they encounter.

Jeff Armstrong
Approximatrix, LLC

Re: Apple silicon support

Should note that my comment about not stressing the M1 build is that I haven't had any problems that were do to the Apple M1 build as opposed to my code. It was kind of fun to see the warning put out on some code that I had originally tried getting to run on a CDC 1700 in 1971 with some FORTRAN II and FORTRAN IV semantics. I did get that running with the MS FORTRAN compiler on an 8MHz 8086, and runs many orders of  magnitude faster on the M1.