Will ROS2 work on Apple Silicon Macs?

Question

Apple is soon to release new Macs based on Arm processors (known as Apple Silicon). How might this affect the support for ROS2 on MacOS? Is this a good or a bad thing for ROS2 on Mac?

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Originally posted by Py on ROS Answers with karma: 501 on 2020-10-28

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by aeltawil on 2020-12-10:
Do you have an update regarding this topic? Do you someone who was successfully get ROS2 to work on any apple silicon Mac?

Comment by Py on 2020-12-14:
I'd be keen to find out whether anyone has tested this!

Answer 1

Other than the CPU architecture, not much will change wrt how software is typically distributed on macos. I believe that's the limiting factor for ROS 2 (and ROS 1 actually).

ROS 2 has support for OSX (it's a Tier 1 supported platform), but the UX is not consistent with Linux and Windows IIUC (I don't have a mac, so don't know).

Moving to ARM doesn't really change that. ARM64 is already supported (see Targeted Platforms in REP-2000), and "Apple Silicon" is really just that.

Homebrew is a bit of a mess though, and so are the other options. So from-source builds can be involved (to say the least). Conda might have a bigger impact, but I'm not sure what the status of the macos support is.

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Originally posted by gvdhoorn with karma: 86574 on 2020-10-28

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Py on 2020-10-29:
Thanks for the insight!