Re: apple silicon fortran

[Iain Sandoe <idsandoe@googlemail.com>]

Hi Jim,

James Secan via Fortran <fortran@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

>> On Jan 8, 2021, at 1:56 AM, Iain Sandoe <idsandoe@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> In fact, none of the issues Jerry mentions are really the blockers:
>> - you can already get builds of the experimental branch from homebrew  
>> and macports
>> - ( and I would surely be willing to release mine, which are generally  
>> weekly, if someone has a suitable hosting site ).
>
> Are these ready to run on Apple silicon,

Yes, I was talking about Arm64/aarch64/Apple Si native/self-hosted on macOS  
11 (Big Sur)

> or on Big Sur on Intel silicon?

macOS 11 on Intel x86_64 will be supported in GCC11 (in fact, is already  
supported and in respectable condition for this stage of the development  
cycle - see [1]); that would be expected to release to the same standard as  
macOS 10.15 (Catalina).

Actually, for the record, there’s a third permutation [2] , but I’ve not  
personally evaluated it.

=====

As for self-hosted, Arm64 native macOS11 ….

> Have the ABI changes you mention been implemented on the back end?

Enough of them have been addressed to be able to bootstrap the compiler and  
get reasonable test output (for Fortran, anyway), but several challenges  
remain…

> That to me seems like the big issue here.

… that is why the branches are described as “experimental”, they certainly  
have limitations (as listed in the issues), but are available to people  
wanting to experiment.

====

I fully understand the need for stability in production platforms (  
although we are of course obliged to develop and test on the ‘bleeding  
edge’  - my production machines stay well away from it too ;) )

cheers
Iain

---

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-testresults/2021-January/643049.html

---

[2] In principle, an X86_64 compiler can be executed on Arm64 macOS 11  
using “Rosetta 2”.  I haven’t tried this to see how well it works (perhaps  
I will give it a try at some point, both in terms of function and  
performance).