SDL2_ttf and SDL2_net frameworks for Apple M1

SDL Development
1

Any idea when SDL2_ttf and SDL2_net MacOS frameworks, pre-compiled for the M1 CPU (‘Apple silicon’), will be available?

1 Like
2

I am waiting for these too, but just an FYI—with just a big of finagling, I was able to compile SDL_ttf from source on M1 including libfreetype.

3

I’m trying to avoid that, not least because I doubt I could work out the ‘finagling’ required!

The saving grace is that Rosetta (the x86-64 emulation for the M1) is so amazingly fast and comprehensive that the regular MacOS edition of my app runs perfectly well. How Apple has achieved this is beyond me, unless there’s a secret x86 core buried in the M1 CPU somewhere. :grinning:

4

It translates the x86-64 instructions to ARM64 ahead of time and caches it on disk. The result is usually pretty fast. Sometimes it can’t translate instructions ahead of time and has to do it on the fly (typically Electron-based apps), and for those apps it can be slow.