Mosh: Apple Silicon Arm Support

[etmartinkazoo]

Are there any plans to support Apple's M1 Arm processors?

[keithw]

Hmm, what would we have to do? My assumption is that HomeBrew (and MacPorts?) will continue to work without us having to do anything. With the change in policy at Travis-CI, I'm not sure we have a great way to auto-build on Mac anymore, unfortunately.

[etmartinkazoo]

@keithw - Unfortunately I'm not sure how you would go about making Mosh compatible for Arm/Apple Silicon. I am a Python developer so I don't know how much assistance I would be as I imagine Mosh is written in a lower level language like C or C++.

Apple has documentation for porting apps here which may be helpful.

[andersk]

The first question is, does it not work already? Mosh is written in a reasonably portable way and I would expect it to work as well as it does on macOS x86-64. Have you tried it?

[etmartinkazoo]

It can run with Apple's Rosetta Translation Environment but not natively on Arm/Apple Silicon.

[andersk]

You’re looking at a specific x86-64 binary. Have you tried building Mosh from source?

[etmartinkazoo]

It is still not possible to build Protocol Buffers. I've opened an issue here. Once that is resolved it should be possible to build Mosh from source.

[andersk]

Your protobuf issue is, again, about a specific binary—this time a Linux binary, which will definitely not run on macOS. You’ll need to build protobuf from source too.

[coder543]

For what it's worth, I just tested mosh on an M1 MacBook Air. It worked perfectly fine. I simply did brew install -s mosh to install it. (And to be extra clear, my brew is not running inside Rosetta -- this is running natively.)