I've been a bit of an ARM64 enthusiast of late, trying out Linux, Windows
10, and iOS devices that run on the ARM64/Aarch64 family of processors.
Emscripten works fine on these machines if one cares to do some light
development work on them, but since there's no binaries built from CI, the
standard emsdk can only install by building from source -- which can take
hours on a middleweight portable machine.

Now that Apple is switching their Mac product line to ARM64 processors over
the next two years, it will likely become much more common next year for
people to have ARM64-based laptop and desktop computers, and some of them
will need to build something with emscripten in their workflows either on
macOS or on a virtualized Linux in Docker etc.

>From what I've seen presented at WWDC, the ARM64 Macs will support emulated
processes, so it may work to ship the x86_64 binaries with the caveat that
they will run much slower than native builds.

Virtualized Linux builds would also need native ARM64 binaries to run, or
else they'd have to sit there for a couple hours compiling after every
upgrade.

And of course there are already Windows 10 and Linux computers available
with ARM64 processes, on sale since a couple years ago and used in the wild
in modest numbers.

I get the impression that the biggest roadblock to explicit ARM64 support
in emscripten is getting it into the CI infrastructure:
* Linux/ARM64 builds and testing?
* macOS/ARM64 builds and testing?
* Windows/ARM64 builds and testing?

It's too soon to start on macOS since it's in beta, dev kits aren't shipped
yet, and there's no obvious way yet to figure out how to run tests on a
macOS ARM system in CI. :)

And I'm less sure how important Win/ARM64 is, given you can use the
Linux/ARM64 version in WSL virtualization. But some folks prefer to develop
on native Windows, too.

If there's any way we can start talking about Linux/ARM64 builds and
testing, I would be very happy about it! I would even kick in a few bucks
for a VM or something if that would help any. ;)

Thanks for your time and your consideration!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
Wikimedia Foundation

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