Apple Silicon

[kresdjan]

What are people on macs with Apple Silicon doing? SBCL is known not to work on macOS and now CCL is only compatible with x86 architecture. And what I have been able to dig up on the internet, there doesn't seem to be a "fix" underway.

Is there perhaps another Common Lisp implementation that we could try? Any ideas?

[c-wicklein]

In what sense does SBCL not work? I use SBCL 2.5.1 on an M2 Mac running Sequoia. (I haven't tried SDL2 or sketch, but the possibility of doing so led me here.)

[StrmSrfr]

I'm guessing kresdjan might be referring to the note from f23f3ae that "Sketch is known to not work with SBCL 1.2.15 on Mac OS X." I now see this note is nearing its tenth birthday, but from the description I don't see any reason to think it's fixed.

Fortunately, it is possible to use Sketch on Apple Silicon, at least until Rosetta 2 is removed in macOS 28.

I think this should be a complete list of what seems to be working (other versions will probably work too, but this is what I'm currently using):

• Apple Silicon (M1) Mac
• macOS Sequoia 15.6
• Clozure CL 1.13, Darwin x86 version from the archive darwinx86.tar.gz
• sketch-20241012-git from QuickLisp
• SDL2 libraries (see note):
  • SDL2 2.32.10: SDL2-2.32.10.dmg
  • SDL2_image 2.8.10: SDL2_image-2.8.10.dmg
  • SDL2_ttf 2.24.0: SDL2_ttf-2.24.0.dmg

macOS will refuse to open just about everything, and I had to go to Privacy & Security System Settings to allow each individual file and then try again.

After I got through all that, I was able to run most of the examples, and I'm excited about the idea of actually using the thing.

Notes about SDL:

• The Sketch documentation says to get the latest version from https://www.libsdl.org/, so I initially tried that, which is an SDL3 version, and I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that didn't work.
• Then, since SDL advises so, I tried to use sdl2-compat. I couldn't find a binary but was able to complete a build. It was not at all clear to me which build files were important or where to put them (I don't know much about macOS shared libraries, and less about cmake), but after all my experimenting I think my problem was actually that it had compiled arm64 libraries and CCL was looking for x86_64 libraries. Anyway, I never got this working.
• So I went with the latest SDL2 releases.
• I copied the .framework folders to /Library/Frameworks. The documentation says you could also use ~/Library/Frameworks, but note this directory might not exist yet.

Additional note about SBCL:
While I was struggling with sdl2-compat, I found this thread and thought I'd give SBCL a try. I gave up. Maybe later I'll try again and do a writeup, but the last error I got was this:

* (ql:quickload :sketch)
To load "sketch":
  Load 1 ASDF system:
    sketch
; Loading "sketch"
...................
; file: /Users/storm/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/cl-sdl2-20231021-git/src/autowrap.lisp
; in: AUTOWRAP:C-INCLUDE '(SDL2 AUTOWRAP-SPEC "SDL2.h")
;     (AUTOWRAP:C-INCLUDE '(SDL2-FFI::SDL2 SDL2-FFI::AUTOWRAP-SPEC "SDL2.h")
;                         :ACCESSOR-PACKAGE :SDL2-FFI.ACCESSORS :FUNCTION-PACKAGE
;                         :SDL2-FFI.FUNCTIONS :SPEC-PATH
;                         '(SDL2-FFI::SDL2 SDL2-FFI::AUTOWRAP-SPEC)
;                         :EXCLUDE-SOURCES
;                         ("/usr/local/lib/clang/([^/]*)/include/(?!stddef.h)"
;                          "/usr/include/" "/usr/include/arm-linux-gnueabihf"
;                          "/usr/include/X11/")
;                         :INCLUDE-SOURCES
;                         ("stdint.h" "bits/types.h" "sys/types.h" "bits/stdint"
;                          "machine/_types.h" "SDL2")
;                         ...)
; 
; caught COMMON-LISP:ERROR:
;   (during macroexpansion of (AUTOWRAP:C-INCLUDE '(SDL2 AUTOWRAP-SPEC ...) ...))
;   Couldn't execute "c2ffi": No such file or directory

debugger invoked on a UIOP/LISP-BUILD:COMPILE-FILE-ERROR in thread
#<THREAD tid=259 "main thread" RUNNING {70050F0003}>:
  COMPILE-FILE-ERROR while compiling #<CL-SOURCE-FILE "sdl2" "autowrap">

I hope this all helps someone.