> Kind of embarrassing that it's taking some devs so long.. Steve Duda managed to get Serum updated within a couple months of the original M1 release.
Is it? Steve Duda has no choice, his lunch is getten eaten by Matt Tytel and the folks at Native Instruments. If he wants to keep selling his $150+ plugin, he better stay on the cutting edge.
For everyone else though, I find it hard to blame them. Overnight you get a complete architecture change that you need to buy test hardware for, test-compile for ARM, find out what breaks, source new ARM-compatible libraries for what dod break, re-write some/all of your codebase to account for these changes, profile the performance difference, re-evaluate if the native version is worth it, then set up a testing and CI pipeline for a second architecture. Since most of these plugins are written with the notoriously fragile JUCE framework in C++, I can see why it's not just an overnight task to get it working on Apple Silicon unless you drop everything and make it your top priority.
For everyone else though, I find it hard to blame them. Overnight you get a complete architecture change
Except it didn’t happen overnight, Apple announced it 6 months in advance. There has been affordable hardware available for porting since june 2020, almost 2 years ago. If a developer hasn’t gotten around to it by now, I doubt it is a priority for them, let alone their top priority.
Duda.. getting his lunch eaten by Native Instruments? Vital I understand (a sort-of-free Serum-like synth is certainly a competitor).. but Native Instruments hasn't done anything interesting in the VST space in years. Odd to throw that in there.
My point is that companies like Native Instruments have vastly more resources and developers than one individual developer, and still very few of their supposedly flagship products are M1 compatible. It's been a year and a half, and Massive X still isn't updated. You'd think they would toss at least one developer at it. I guess that maybe points to organizational rot more than anything (I guess Massive X generally being an outdated flop is also evidence of this), but the point stands.
Is it? Steve Duda has no choice, his lunch is getten eaten by Matt Tytel and the folks at Native Instruments. If he wants to keep selling his $150+ plugin, he better stay on the cutting edge.
For everyone else though, I find it hard to blame them. Overnight you get a complete architecture change that you need to buy test hardware for, test-compile for ARM, find out what breaks, source new ARM-compatible libraries for what dod break, re-write some/all of your codebase to account for these changes, profile the performance difference, re-evaluate if the native version is worth it, then set up a testing and CI pipeline for a second architecture. Since most of these plugins are written with the notoriously fragile JUCE framework in C++, I can see why it's not just an overnight task to get it working on Apple Silicon unless you drop everything and make it your top priority.