Apple Silicon Native Build

[mrp]

Hello,

With Apple’s new M1 powered Mac’s can we expect a native Apple Silicon version of Sublime Text 3 in the near future?

Thanks,

Morgan

[OdatNurd]

This seems very unlikely; a porting effort is already well underway for ST4 (regarding builds that run on ARM64) and the devs have mentioned in the past that there isn’t really an intention to add anything further to existing ST3 builds outside of the area of things that stop it from running (a stated example of such being code signing changes).

Although running on new hardware might technically fall into that category, to do so would require porting two versions of the code to new hardware, which seems unlikely since presumably the intention of coming out with a whole new version and all of the changes already available in it is an upgrade path that makes the time spent monetarily feasible.

[soheil]

I’m not sure if I fully understand your reply. Why do you need to maintain two versions of the code? I thought you could just pass an architecture flag to the compiler during build time. Also Apple Silicon is very likely to be dominating at least the Mac ecosystem very soon given its multiplicative performance improvement. Combine this with the fact that majority of ST users are Mac users.

[OdatNurd]

I’m not one of the Sublime developers, though I have ported a fair number of applications to different architectures and in my experience it is indeed not as simple as just flipping a switch.

However, logically speaking ARM support has been requested for a very long time, so if it was possible to just generate an ARM version with no code changes, it would probably have happened long before now.

So, my guess is that there are changes that needed to be made of one sort or another to get it working and it’s not fully straight forward (and hence the experimental arm builds that are already available).

[facelessuser]

Sometimes just changing a compiler version can require code changes. A whole new compiler can have various quirks specific to that compiler. I say this as someone who works with embedded systems in C/C++ which have changed compilers.

[ctesmer]

well underway for ST 4

Hold on. This is the second mention of ST4 that I’m seeing today… is sublime text 4 a real thing that I can get my hands on now??

[OdatNurd]

Yes; if you have an ST3 license. There are development builds available in the Discord server. It’s currently in semi-unpublic beta (that is, it’s a thing, and you can use it, but it’s not been publicly announced).

[ctesmer]

Awesome! Thanks so much!!! Great to know it’s being worked on.