Latest news on native ARM compatibility

• (2020-12-26) We currently have 3168 formulas bottled for Apple Silicon in homebrew-core. At this point, the table below is probably not really relevant anymore (except for historical reference) and the best way to know if a formula is working is “does it have an ARM bottle” (a :arm64_big_sur line in the bottle block).
• (2020-12-04) A fellow maintainer has been setting up ARM-based Macs as CI nodes for Homebrew.
  That means Apple Silicon bottles are coming soon. Bottle-building may start next week, which is a few weeks earlier than we thought. Expect bottling to drag along. It definitely won’t be finished in 2020.
  Homebrew remains unsupported on Apple Silicon, and will become supported once enough bottles are built and once everything feels stable enough.
• (2020-11-18) Added Major blockers section for a quick overview.
• (2020-11-18) Issue with mkmf in Ruby.framework resolved (FB7836181).
  All brew commands that depend on that gem, e. g. brew audit, seem to work now.
• (2020-11-15) Issues with code signing now resolved thanks to @fxcoudert, @mistydemeo and others.
• (2020-11-15) There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come. See both macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon #7857 (comment) about CI infrastructure and macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon #7857 (comment) about GCC for details.
• (2020-11-15) Native ARM Homebrew installations are only going to be supported at /opt/homebrew (once support arrives). See macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon #7857 (comment) for details.

A detailed description of the proposed feature

This is an overview of compatibility issues and work items related to native ARM Homebrew installations on macOS 11.0 (Big Sur). Homebrew doesn’t support it right now but we need to track and triage those items nonetheless.

The motivation for the feature

macOS 11.0 (Big Sur) has been released to the public, and our goal is for Homebrew to support it.

How the feature would be relevant to at least 90% of Homebrew users

In the long run, more than 90 % of Homebrew (macOS) users are going to run Apple Silicon hardware.

What alternatives to the feature have been considered

No alternatives.

Major blockers

• Set up ARM-based CI infrastructure

  Have Homebrew’s CI build arm64_big_sur bottles

  go (waiting for upstream version 1.16)

  rust (waiting for upstream version 1.49 or backport to 1.47/1.48)

  ghc (help wanted)

  qt (help wanted)

  openjdk (waiting for upstream version 16; work in progress to integrate OpenJDK 16 preview as stop-gap)

  gcc (work in progress, see macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon #7857 (comment))

  Others (see macOS 11 Big Sur compatibility on Apple Silicon #7857 (comment))
  To pick up a draggable item, press the space bar. While dragging, use the arrow keys to move the item. Press space again to drop the item in its new position, or press escape to cancel.

Status of core formulae

curl -sLS \
  'https://formulae.brew.sh/api/analytics/install/90d.json' \
  | jq -r '.items
    | map(select (.formula | contains("/") | not) | .formula)[:512]
    | sort
    | [""] + map("`\(.)`")
    | map([., "", ""] | @csv)
    | .[]
    ' \
  | pandoc -f csv -t gfm \
  | sed -e 's/\\`/`/g'

¹ For Works on 11.0, the key is:

• 🥇brew install -s succeeds on Apple Silicon. The software works well enough natively.
• 🥈 The formula has been updated with depends_on :arch => [:x86_64, :build]. The software works well enough on Rosetta.
• 🥉 The formula has known issues on macOS 11, though most features work. The issues are described in the Comments field.
• 🚫 The formula has been updated with depends_on :arch => :x86_64. The software has been deemed to work on Intel only (for now).
• ⚠️ The formula has been found to need more analysis/work.