software-challenge / software-challenge/gui

Add arm64 macOS (Apple Silicon) build

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#96 8 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement good first issue help wanted
Dominant language
Kotlin
Stars
11
Forks
5
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Warum ist der aktuelle Stand nicht akzeptabel?

The current macOS binaries produced by GitHub Releases don't run on ARM Macs as they bundle native x86_64 JavaFX libraries. Strangely running java under Rosetta doesn't work either, but since Java is largely cross-platform we should probably avoid emulation entirely.

Was wäre dein Lösungsansatz?

Provide a build for the macos-aarch64 (aka. osx-aarch64) platform as described in the upstream Gradle-JFX plugin.

While having GitHub-provisioned ARM runners would make this easy (since we could just add a new OS to the matrix), these aren't available yet. Still, making cross-builds should be doable since the JVM code is cross-platform anyway, so we would only have to ensure that Gradle bundles the native libraries for the specified target architecture. Still, that might require some fiddling, as evidenced by this thread:

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Locate the Gradle configuration that produces the GitHub Releases macOS binaries and compare it with the upstream Gradle-JFX plugin guidance for cross-platform projects. Check the linked plugin issue for cross-build constraints; done means a macos-aarch64/osx-aarch64 release is produced with native ARM libraries and runs without Rosetta on Apple Silicon.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java, kotlin
Domain
build-system, desktop
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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