Hector Martin

Wondering how the Apple ARM transition is going to affect huge plug-in ecosystems, like DAWs and VSTs. This could go very poorly, with the effective loss of anything that isn't being actively developed and/or having to re-buy everything for ARM...

Wouldn't Rosetta take care of that?

I doubt Rosetta lets you mix native and emulated plug-ins in the same process. That is a generally unsolvable problem, especially if the ABIs aren't almost identical save for the instruction stream. And you wouldn't want to be using Rosetta on high performance DSP code anyway.

Emulators can make do without modifying the system. Apple is better positioned. Apple controls system libraries. They can provide interposers. There will be quirks of course, but the vast majority of binaries should work. ABI breakage happens without the need of changing arch.

I'm talking about plug-ins. You can't provide a generic interposer that works for arbitrary plugin interfaces. Interposers have to be written specifically for every ABI boundary. Apple can make apps work but they can't make plug-ins work with different arch apps.

We're *already* still halfway through the x86->amd64 bit transition in that space, and that's painful enough, and at least both of those run on the same CPU. Going to ARM now is going to be worse.

So what's going to happen is all pro software on ARM Macs is going to be stuck running in fully emulated x86 mode for years, until the entire ecosystem moves to ARM. And then you'll have to buy everything again. And until then performance will be bad. This isn't good.