It would be irresponsible of us to make promises we cannot keep. We have applied for prototype hardware, but are awaiting a response to see if we are selected (we presume the number of developer-preview Macs is limited).Īs usual, we plan to be as open and transparent about this as we can as we all get a better understanding of the issues. We have access to the Big Sur beta and are currently testing and investigating. These libraries often target older versions of macOS and sometimes require effort on our part to support. These libraries are not under our direct control and will have different constraints to transitioning than we do. Rhino reads and writes many different file formats and we rely on many third-party libraries to support this. This adds complication as all our tools and processes must take this new target architecture into account. We’ve invested in tools and processes that enable us to deliver Rhino on both Windows and Mac, as well as support a cross-platform plugin architecture. In the past decade, we’ve made major efforts to write Rhino as a cross-platform application. As Blender is also an OpenGL application, this is interesting news for us. During the Platform State of the Union, Apple stated that they have a patch to the open-source Blender project ready to help support Apple Silicon. We will be curious to see how this move to Apple Silicon impacts our efforts on the Metal front. Rhino for Mac has yet to make the transition to Metal (this is a significant project). Two years ago, Apple deprecated OpenGL in favor of Metal. One aspect of all this that we are very curious about is the fate of OpenGL on the Mac platform. At this juncture, we have more questions than answers. The short answer is: we do not know yet and there is a lot of investigation to do before we understand the scope of work. Ok, what does all this mean for Rhino for Mac? During this presentation, they also talked about upcoming patches to key open-source projects - like Mono - to help the transition along. Apple is claiming great performance running under Rosetta, but it is meant as a transitional technology, not a long-term solution. (Rosetta was used during the transition between PowerPC and Intel, back in the day). One of the key technologies for this transition is called “Rosetta 2,” which is an emulation layer built into macOS Big Sur that allows applications targeting Intel processors to run on the upcoming Apple Silicon Macs. Apple claims that this effort takes “about a week or two of engineering effort.” They have also created prototype hardware with the new processors for developers, which they plan to ship shortly.Īfter the Keynote, more details were revealed in the Platform State of the Union. The upcoming version of Xcode (12) will also contain the SDKs and tools necessary to help developers transition to the new processors.
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