With Apple’s latest announcement that they’re moving toward ARM CPUs for many of their systems, how does this impact LightBurn? I know this ask is a bit premature as hardware isn’t available to the general public as of yet, but was indeed something I couldn’t help wondering about.
I know lack of ARM support for some of Lightburn’s dependent framework libraries was one of the gating factors for getting LB running on a Raspberry Pi, for instance. Do you foresee this being a problem for Mac hardware on ARM in the future?
I’m sure Oz will come in with more specifics, but we don’t know yet. The general idea is similar to that of the Pi - libraries aren’t available, but Win 10 on the latest Pi’s came with a translation layer so LightBurn could sort of work, but performance wasn’t great. I figure Apple would do something similar, we would see how the performance was, and perhaps this would prompt more of those library creators to make ARM versions…
Apple has already stated that they’ve resurrected Rosetta for this and will translate x86 to ARM in realtime. They say it won’t come with a noticeable performance impact, but I also expect that to be a wheelbarrow full of lies in the real world
I’ll likely need to own a unit to properly test for it
We’ll have to wait until our framework is available on it, as well as all the other libraries we use, like the image trace, license system, OpenCV, etc.
Newer versions of the aforementioned libraries likely mean API changes, meaning code incompatibility, and that’ll take a while to sort out.
Market penetration of these machines in the laser world is going to be pretty low initially, so there won’t be many users affected by this for a while anyway.
TLDR: Even if everything else is place, it might not be worth supporting them for a year or so anyway - ROI will be low.
