If you’re on the extempore mailing list you’ll have seen the chatter over the last year or so about how development has (sortof) stalled due to the “core team” (@digego and @me, but calling it a “core team” makes it sound more grown-up) having other committments these days and not so much time to hack on it.

Well, a recent (much appreciated!) drive-by PR got me thinking… how much work would it actually be to get it working properly on aarch64. This has been the main thing weighing me down for a while; I’m still doing the occasional livecoding gig using an old intel build (via rosetta 2) but that’s being phased out.

So I had a reasonably free afternoon yesterday and pulled down that branch (thanks @soulofmischief). It built straight away (yay!) but couldn’t actually compile/run xtlang code. And there was some futzing with the build setup required, and a few external lib updates, and other general gardening tasks.

By the end of yesterday I had:

• extempore building & the full “audio” suite of libraries working correctly (including AOT-compilation) on both macOS aarch and Linux x64
• made headway on updating the build & test GitHub Actions workflows (still not properly working yet, though)
• streamlined a few aspects of the build process (not related to the aarch64 port specifically, just ‘axe sharpening’ stuff while I was working on it)

It all works on my M3 MBP and my x64 Linux box. I haven’t got easy access to a Windows machine these days so I’m relying on the (very indirect and frustrating) GitHub windows runners to do my debugging there. So that’s something that’ll need to be done before this can ever land on the main branch.

I also didn’t touch the graphics stuff; some of it might Just Work^TM although I suspect not. And graphics is a big support burden (esp. since extempore is all OpenGL) so I think I’m reconsidering whether we even include that stuff in the “core distribution” anymore, or just leave it as libraries that might/might not work depending on your platform.

But it wasn’t too bad, and I feel positive that it’s do-able without an unreasonable amount of engineering effort. One other problem is that I’m going away for a month in Dec/Jan, so I don’t think this branch will be tested & ready before then. But if any extempore users out there want to pull down & compile the aarch64 branch and give me feedback (either via GH or on the extempore mailing list) then that’d be much appreciated.