Are we going to support ARM-based Apple hardware?

[mreineck]

This is not a terribly urgent question, but we will have to address it at some point.

I'm pretty sure that my C++ components can be adjusted without many problems, but performance may be degraded quite severely, since at least initially there will be no support for vector instructions.

[ziotom78]

I read the news and am quite concerned. As you said, this is not urgent, but surely it will impact our codebase in the lifetime expected for the framework.

I would say that we should prepare ourselves for the future, as long as this does not affects our work considerably. (We applied the same line of reasoning when we discussed Windows support, which is why we switched to WSL-only based installs.) Therefore, if it's easy for our code to support ARM-based architecture, let's go for it!

(Sidenote: if results show that litebird_sim will work happily, but with reduced performance, perhaps this will convince somebody that it's worth to abandon Apple's world: a net positive gain!)

[mreineck]

(Sidenote: if results show that litebird_sim will work happily, but with reduced performance, perhaps this will convince somebody that it's worth to abandon Apple's world: a net positive gain!)

While I can sympathize with the sentiment regarding the OS and its vendor, I expect that ARM hardware will become more popular in the future, not only in Apple machines, and I think this is a positive development. So I'll definitely do some research on optimizing for ARM...