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Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

electronjs.org

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Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#11

Post by quantummkv »

alwayssmh wrote: post #7

i don't recall such support when msft was launching arm based laptops. does anyone have insight to why this is so? is it a case of apple developer relations doing an outstanding job engaging with the community?

It's mostly due to the fact that unlike Microsoft, Apple is doing a complete migration to ARM. The developers have to migrate to ARM because they cannot just tell users to buy x86 macs like they could do for windows

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#14

Post by exacube »

DenseComet wrote: post #5

From their blog post about Apple Silicon[1] > In the future, we will release a package that allows you to "merge" your arm64 and x64 apps into a single universal binary, but it's worth noting that this binary would be huge and probably isn't ideal for shipping to users. It seems like things are going to get a bit confusing with Electron apps, and with the number of Electron apps that exist, this transition might not…

how much of storage on macs is actually used up by code though?

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#15

Post by gfody »

alwayssmh wrote: post #7

i don't recall such support when msft was launching arm based laptops. does anyone have insight to why this is so? is it a case of apple developer relations doing an outstanding job engaging with the community?

I think the significant advent is the M1 chip itself. I was never interested in Win10 ARM edition until the prospect of running it on an M1 Mac. Unfortunately it looks like Apple have taken this opportunity to drop support for alternative OSes entirely.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#16

Post by Uehreka »

quantummkv wrote: post #11
alwayssmh wrote: post #7

i don't recall such support when msft was launching arm based laptops. does anyone have insight to why this is so? is it a case of apple developer relations doing an outstanding job engaging with the community?

It's mostly due to the fact that unlike Microsoft, Apple is doing a complete migration to ARM. The developers have to migrate to ARM because they cannot just tell users to buy x86 macs like they could do for windows

This sounds correct to my knowledge, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a substantive difference between the Microsoft and Apple ARM transitions that’s not obvious to me.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#17

Post by johncolanduoni »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #8
gigatexal wrote: post #2

I hope the new M1 Macs stay cool to the touch when running electron apps still. They should now that this runs natively.

Why would Electron run anymore or less natively with this change?

Without this (assuming Rosetta 2 support was ironed out), the code generated by JITing JavaScript would also need to go through translation from x86 to ARM64.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#18

Post by Hamuko »

DenseComet wrote: post #5

From their blog post about Apple Silicon[1] > In the future, we will release a package that allows you to "merge" your arm64 and x64 apps into a single universal binary, but it's worth noting that this binary would be huge and probably isn't ideal for shipping to users. It seems like things are going to get a bit confusing with Electron apps, and with the number of Electron apps that exist, this transition might not…

>it's worth noting that this binary would be huge and probably isn't ideal for shipping to users

Funny, because that's what I've always considered of Electron. I wonder where the breaking point for Electron is?

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#19

Post by mcintyre1994 »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #8
gigatexal wrote: post #2

I hope the new M1 Macs stay cool to the touch when running electron apps still. They should now that this runs natively.

Why would Electron run anymore or less natively with this change?

I’m guessing Electron apps worked without explicit support via Rosetta 2, but with explicit support the performance should be better. And - speculating - I’d guess that there’s quite a lot of code in Electron apps that isn’t AOTed by Rosetta, and that it would have more performance implications there than a native x86 Mac App would just because it has a lot of ongoing transpilation to do. With this change they can cut out Rosetta 2, and run direct on ARM.

Re: Electron 11.0 released with support for Apple Silicon

#20

Post by johncolanduoni »

Uehreka wrote: post #16
quantummkv wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly due to the fact that unlike Microsoft, Apple is doing a complete migration to ARM. The developers have to migrate to ARM because they cannot just tell users to buy x86 macs like they could do for windows

This sounds correct to my knowledge, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s a substantive difference between the Microsoft and Apple ARM transitions that’s not obvious to me.

Apple also already has had widely used ARM64 tooling since the iPhone 5S. Microsoft’s has only been used by people targeting Windows Phone & their half-hearted ARM laptops.
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