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Crates for macOS

There's a Mac-special Alire repository on Github which provides three things, two of which are tool-related and hopefully temporary.

Alire​

At 2024-04-19, the official Alire site only supports an Intel (x86_64) build of Alire, which won't support native development on Apple silicon.

You can find an Apple (aarch64) build of Alire 2.0.1 here.

Workrounds​

gprbuild can try to build static standalone libraries, where the 'standalone' part means that the library will be automatically elaborated. It does this using features available in GNU binutils, but not in Mach-O binary -- on either machine architecture. Alternative versions of crates that normally would attempt this are provided in the Mac-related index:

  • langkit_support-24.0.1, builds a plain static library.
  • libadalang-24.0.1, likewise.

Toolchain items​

The crates in the Mac-related index are

  • gnat_macos_aarch64=13.2.2, native GNAT for Apple silicon.
  • gprbuild=24.0.1-mac-aarch64, matching gprbuild (avoids you having to say --target=aarch64-apple-darwin at every compilation!)

Note that Alire's community index already (2024-04-19) provides gnat_native=13.2.2 for macOS; no doubt an equivalent gprbuild will be available shortly.

Installing the Mac-special Alire index​

To install:

$ alr index --reset-community
$ alr index \
   --add=git+https://github.com/simonjwright/alire-index.mac.git \
   --before=community \
   --name=index_for_mac