As I’ve seen nothing being discussed about this on the forum so I’d just like to post a small report (I hope it’s not out-of-topic, sorry and feel free to close if it is)
First of all: elm binary from official distribution works PERFECTLY FINE. If any of you are on a new Apple M1 machine and having trouble getting it to work, here’s what I did:
- Download the official build from GitHub https://github.com/elm/compiler/releases (uses the
binary-for-mac-64-bit.gzoption) - Extracted the archive,
cdto the folder andchmod +x elm - Move the
elmbinary tonode_modules/.binfolder in my project. - Adds
node_modules/.binas first entry in myPATHenvironment variable to make sure this is the first binary anything will pick up. - Runs
parcelorwebpackor whatever tool as usual. - Things compile juuuusssst fineee
It, of course, is running via the Rosetta 2 translator. If you run file elm on it this is returned (obviously):
» uname -m
arm64
» file ./node_modules/.bin/elm
./node_modules/.bin/elm: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
So I wonder if it’s possible to get a native aarch64 build so the first thing I want to check is wether Haskell runs and unfortunately, seems it does not.
The information is here: https://doesitarm.com/app/haskell/ , that page links to this tracking issue on Haskell gitlab:
So I assumed Elm would also fail. Trying to install it via Homebrew (configured in arm64 mode, installing in /opt/homebrew) fails with an error while trying to ./configure GHC:
==> ./configure --prefix=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/ghc@8.8/8.8.4_1/libexec/integer-gmp --with-pic --d
Last 15 lines from /Users/chakrit/Library/Logs/Homebrew/ghc@8.8/01.configure:
2020-12-17 22:53:17 +0700
./configure
--prefix=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/ghc@8.8/8.8.4_1/libexec/integer-gmp
--with-pic
--disable-shared
--build=arm_vortex_tempest-apple-darwin20
checking build system type... Invalid configuration `arm_vortex_tempest-apple-darwin20': machine `arm_vortex_tempest-apple' not recognized
configure: error: /bin/sh ./config.sub arm_vortex_tempest-apple-darwin20 failed
Trying to install via yarn global add elm (which is actually just a downloader, which should work theoretically as the manual binary download does work)
It however fails with:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Downloading Elm 0.19.1 from GitHub.
NOTE: You can avoid npm entirely by downloading directly from:
https://github.com/elm/compiler/releases/download/0.19.1/binary-for-mac-undefined.gz
All this package does is download that file and put it somewhere.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- ERROR -----------------------------------------------------------------------
I ran into trouble decompressing the downloaded binary. It is saying:
Error: incorrect header check
NOTE: You can avoid npm entirely by downloading directly from:
https://github.com/elm/compiler/releases/download/0.19.1/binary-for-mac-undefined.gz
All this package does is download that file and put it somewhere.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Which, noting from the -undefined part in the library, someone (or me, if I have energy left for the day) should go and update the elm npm package to uses the x86_64 option for now if it detects darwin-arm64 or aarch64 somewhere.
So it looks like if you have CI/CD setup or a build script shared by multiple devs, you might want to update it to download the x86_64 build directly from GitHub instead to make sure there is minimal disruption.
If anyone was experimenting with Elm on arm64 machines, I’d love to hear/learn more about it.
If you’re looking to buy new Apple Macs to hack on node/elm, I’m happy to report that I’ve been working on it for a week (parcel+elm setup) and have yet to encounter any arm-specific issues : )