Are there any plans to compile Emlid Studio as a Universal Binary to run natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel-based Mac computers?
Thanks
Hi @DirtyHarry,
Haven’t heard of such plans. But sounds interesting, so I’d love to learn a bit more. Why do you need a Universal Binary version? Do you mean Emlid Studio doesn’t work on some of your PC now?
Apple has almost completed transitioning their entire Mac product line to their own ARM-based Apple Silicon processors. This has been going on for coming up to 2 years now. Its no state secret 
Intel-based Mac’s will in due course become end-of life and unsupported (much as happened to their previous PowerPC based machines in the mid-2000’s and the original Mac line that used Motorola 68000 processors in the mid-1990’s).
Universal Binary support means the Xcode compiler that you guys use to build Emlid Studio for the Mac has both x86_64 and arm64 code included in the executable such that the OS can decide at execution time which version to run natively - the older architecture or the new architecture - depending on what CPU the machine has - without having to resort to using translation (Rosetta2).
Translation is fine, to an extent, but actually you really want the application to perform at its best - especially something with a lot of compute/processing required and for this its always best to run the application natively rather than through a translation layer.
Its better explained here:
It’s the ‘best-practice’ way to be compiling your Mac applications
Hi @DirtyHarry,
Nice to read such a detailed explanation, thanks! I’ve passed the idea to our devs.
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Thanks very much Kseniia
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