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Issue 19.3 ('Black Hole')
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FEATURE

More ARM

Xojo 2021r1 Adds More Support for Apple Silicon

Issue: 19.3 (May/June 2021)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 11,059
Starting Page Number: 16
Article Number: 19303
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.xdevmag.com/browse/16.2/16205/

Excerpt of article text...

In xDev 19.1 (January/February 2021) I wrote about Xojo's support for Apple's new ARM-based Macs. While overall I was pleased and impressed, I was disappointed that there were a few missing links. These included the new Worker objects for multiprocessing not being ARM-compatible, and XojoScripts not supported in ARM-based apps. I'm delighted to report that with Xojo 2021r1, both of those omissions have been rectified.

XojoScript: Better Than Ever

My main use for Xojo are the dozens of small utility apps I've written over the use to help automate various projects and tasks (many related to xDev). Because I like to tweak these apps frequently, I have fallen in love with XojoScript, which lets me make additions and changes instantly without having to recompile the main app. Therefore, the vast majority of my utilities depend on XojoScript and I was bummed I couldn't make them Apple Silicon-native.

Granted, these aren't heavy-duty programs that need great horse, er, CPU power, but it was just the principal of the matter. I had a new M1 Mac and I wanted everything to be native.

I am so pleased to report that with Xojo 2021r1, all I had to do was choose "Universal" as my build target and hit the Build button to create new versions of these apps that use XojoScript and they work flawlessly!

As expected, for most of these I see no speed benefit, but I suspected there might be better memory management as less Intel code has to be used. Examining my StockScripter app (which I wrote about in xDev 16.2, http://www.xdevmag.com/browse/16.2/16205/) showed this to be true (see Figure 1). The Intel version is using over 300MB of real memory versus the Universal version's 73MB.

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