On Dec 4, 2020, at 09:18, Alejandro Imass wrote:

> quick question: is Apple using more or less the same stack and toolchain i.e. 
> Mach + FBSD backbone and LLVM, etc. ? or has something very important changed 
> for Apple silicon?

The very important thing that has changed is that Apple Silicon is arm64 
architecture. Many existing ports have build systems that assume Macs don't use 
arm64 architecture and fail to build as a result. These will need to be 
identified and fixed, hopefully in consultation with the developers of the 
software.

The OS kernel is still Mach, the userland software is still largely BSD based, 
LLVM is still used as the compiler, on macOS 11 on any architecture, just as it 
was on macOS 10.x for a long time.

I hear the process of booting the operating system is quite different on Apple 
Silicon: it's more similar to how iOS devices boot. But these are details that 
do not affect us in MacPorts since we deal only in user installable software.

Reply via email to