Support Apple Silicon in Release Builds

[xanderdunn]

macOS release builds are currently x86_64 architecture only. Apple has moved away from x86_x64 in favor of arm64 for its laptop and desktop machines. It would be beneficial to developers on Mac machines to provide macOS arm64 builds in releases.

[cameel]

This is on our roadmap but we're blocked by our testing infrastructure. Currently neither Github Actions nor CircleCI support Apple M1 runners. See:

• Apple M1 (Apple Silion) Support on CircleCI
• Support for VMs on Apple M1 actions/runner-images#2187

All we can do currently is to cross-compile for that platform on Intel-based macOS runners but we would not be able to run tests against these executables so we're not comfortable including them in the official releases.

In the meantime, you should still be able to get a native build of the compiler using our homebrew formulas because that will build the compiler from source on your own M1 machine.

Also note that we provide wasm builds which should run on any platform and many frameworks use them via solc-js. You can already use the compiler on M1 this way with e.g. Hardhat or Truffle.

[cameel]

Related issue for Linux on ARM: #11351.

[axic]

In practice #11351 was tracking this issue as we're still waiting for CircleCI.

[axic]

And if someone builds Solidity from source on macOS, it is automatically built for ARM. No flag or setting needed.

[cameel]

In practice #11351 was tracking this issue as we're still waiting for CircleCI.

Might still be better to have to separate issues because I suspect that we won't be implementing both at the same time. But we could also close this one and just update the title of the other one to make it clear that it's about macOS too.

BTW, you reminded me that on the last call with CircleCI they said that added support for Linux on ARM.

[xanderdunn]

Thanks @cameel, I missed the Linux ARM issue in my search. Building the repo on my system at the 0.7.6 tag worked. Installing 0.8.9 or 0.8.10 via Homebrew also worked. However, the Homebrew 0.7.6 formula built for the wrong architecture, still x86.

[cameel]

However, the Homebrew 0.7.6 formula built for the wrong architecture, still x86.

Interesting. @axic is this something we had to explicitly add support for in our CMake config? 0.7 and 0.8 formulas are nearly identical and the only significant difference is which Solidity source tarball gets used.

[xanderdunn]

Hmm, disregard the Homebrew issue. I'm not sure what I did the first time but installing again just now has the right architecture:

$ brew install solidity@7
$ which solc
/opt/homebrew/bin/solc
$ solc --version
solc, the solidity compiler commandline interface
Version: 0.7.6+commit.7338295f.Darwin.appleclang
$ file $(which solc)
/opt/homebrew/bin/solc: Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64

This is on our roadmap but we're blocked by our testing infrastructure. Currently neither Github Actions nor CircleCI support Apple M1 runners. See:

• Apple M1 (Apple Silion) Support on CircleCI
• Support for VMs on Apple M1 actions/virtual-environments#2187

All we can do currently is to cross-compile for that platform on Intel-based macOS runners but we would not be able to run tests against these executables so we're not comfortable including them in the official releases.

In the meantime, you should still be able to get a native build of the compiler using our homebrew formulas because that will build the compiler from source on your own M1 machine.

Also note that we provide wasm builds which should run on any platform and many frameworks use them via solc-js. You can already use the compiler on M1 this way with e.g. Hardhat or Truffle.

In practice #11351 was tracking this issue as we're still waiting for CircleCI.

Might still be better to have to separate issues because I suspect that we won't be implementing both at the same time. But we could also close this one and just update the title of the other one to make it clear that it's about macOS too.

BTW, you reminded me that on the last call with CircleCI they said that added support for Linux on ARM.

@cameel

Thanks for the information, it is much appreciated :) By any chance, do you have any updates with regards to where GitHub Actions is at with respect to its support for an Apple M1 runner?

[cameel]

No idea about Github Actions, though we'd only really use it as the last resort since almost all of our CI and build infrastructure is on CircleCI.

As for CircleCI, they showed it on their roadmap last time we talked to them and it's definitely coming (obstacles seem to be mostly of legal nature) but there's no concrete ETA for it at this moment.

Thanks for that info. Looking forward to seeing what happens with apple silicon support