#XCODE FOR MAC AIR SOFTWARE#
#XCODE FOR MAC AIR CODE#

This means that even though Python itself is available natively for the Apple M1, all the scientific libraries, most notably numpy are not as they contain Fortran components. Now you might ask, so what? Not many people do scientific computing? The thing is that all modern machine learning and AI applications make extensive use of these libraries especially for things like linear algebra. These libraries are highly reliable and work great. Now you might ask, so what? Who uses Fortran these days anyway? The thing is nearly all scientific libraries were written in the 60s and 70s in Fortran and have all been made open source. The most notable case is anything written in Fortran was stalled because GNU has the good Fortran compiler. This then slowed down the development of any applications that depend on the GNU toolchain. There are now test builds of the GNU toolchain, or you can build it yourself, but not a released one yet. Sadly they didnвЂ™t provide the same level of help to the GNU GCC open source toolchain. WhatвЂ™s Missing?ДЄpple has fully embraced the LLVM open source toolchain and helped have that project fully support the new Macs. In fact currently the M1 processor is faster than any existing iPhone or iPads, so iOS apps actually run fastest on the new Macs. Now that everything is using the same processor, suddenly the iPhone and iOS simulators are fast and much more productive. On older Intel based Macs, to test the application the computer had to emulate the ARM processor and the iOS simulators were quite slow and clunky. If you develop iOS or MacOS applications using Cocoa then this is the platform for you. This shouldnвЂ™t be too much of a surprise as these have all been working fine on the ARM based Raspberry Pi for quite a few years now. All these tools are very fast and seem to work perfectly in the native ARM environment. There is a version of make installed and you can do this all from a command shell without using the XCode IDE at all.

#XCODE FOR MAC AIR CODE#

After installing XCode (which is huge), you can run command line tools to compile C code and Assembly language code. That means besides XCode and Swift, you also get natively compiled versions of LLVM, Python and a number of other tools. As long as you donвЂ™t compile or debug for Intel, you donвЂ™t need Rosetta installed to run all these.

#XCODE FOR MAC AIR SOFTWARE#

The whole XCode system is a combination of Apple created software along with a number of open source development tools. You can run most MacOS Intel based programs using Rosetta 2, but IвЂ™m interested in what runs in natively compiled ARM code that ideally uses the builtin M1 functionality where appropriate. These systems are really new so there are a few missing pieces, but these are filling in fast. These are now the best way to develop iOS Apps for iPhones and iPads. IвЂ™ve been playing with my new M1 based Apple MacBook Air for a few weeks now, so I thought IвЂ™d blog about how it is as a development machine.

Xcode for mac air