richmond62 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 27, 2024 2:46 pm
If it is relatively easy to recompile the engine on Linux what exactly makes things so difficult to compile an engine for MacOS ARM?
It's not relatively easy at all, on any platform.
Please see
my post to Brian, where I describe what was changed.
What made it possible on Linux, was the fact that I only had the command line to worry about. I didn't also have to fight with VisualStudio or xCode. (There was no additional layer of compiler to contend with).
Even then though, the Gyp build tool had a lot of seriously outdated and depreciated syntax which had to be updated first. Thankfully, it's not too hard to replace the depreciated parts - just time consuming and monotonous, but at least it tells you as you step through it.
But certainly not an easy task. What makes it so difficult to compile for MacOS arm is you are changing the execution language of the application binary. It's not a (simpler) recompile where you make some changes to the source, and recompile the application - (with a normal source change, you aren't having to re-write the execution code each time you do this). When you change the target platform from intel over to Arm, there's also Apple API changes to consider - the way the engine interfaces with other parts of the OS in ways that Apple sanction and expect an application to do.
Plus, as I mentioned elsewhere before my post was deleted, it's not just a case of changing the engine over to arm. The standalones would need to be updated to run on arm too (perhaps a simpler task to some degree), but it really depends on what we've been left with, and how-far-along Arm support came in the 9.7.0-dp1 source.