Rosetta Mac App Translation Process Can Take 20 Seconds on First Launch [Updated]

[scartart]

If subsequent launches are faster, the translated code must be stored somewhere. I wonder how much storage that will take and what that could do for systems with not much free space on disk.

Probably not really any worse than a native application as these will mainly be Universal 2 fat binaries holding the code for both x86 and AS.

 

[Kabeyun]

every time the app is launched?

No, Rosetta Mac App Translation Process Can Take 20 Seconds on First Launch only on the first launch.

 

[MikeZTM]

Possibly, though those applications will probably run native once the Arm native JRE comes out.

BTW it already came out. Only problem is it's JDK 14+ and no backport to JDK 8 LTS now.
Plus it's using Zero not Hotspot JIT but that's mostly fine for Java client application.

 

[Darth Tulhu]

We may never know the answer as to why the Davy Jones this translation not done during installation.

But we're in a tranny period, so at least the pain point is reduced until Devs get their apps together.

 

[OnlyMortal]

This is by far the ideal situation. You can't really beat ahead of time translation, pretty much will be faster once it's done no matter what.

Or it could be pre-translated for the target at installation time.

 

[Joniz]

Well I’ve already seen the same thing with the new Ulysses, Affinity Photo & Designer on an intel Mac Mini with Catalina. First start-up bounces for some time, then fine from there.

That’s not a Rosetta problem.

 

[Kabeyun]

This seems like a real non-issue in that it only happens once. However, I’m a bit surprised they didn’t go the one step further and pre-perform this translation during installation, as opposed to waiting for the user to attempt to launch the app.

Or it could be pre-translated for the target at installation time.

Might that present a problem for people just copying apps for storage? I’m imagining a scenario where one has a larger volume on an Apple silicon machine used for archiving. If an app is modified at the time of copying rather than launching, it wouldn’t be backwards compatible with an Intel Mac.

 

[HiRez]

Fine as long as it's a one-time thing. Still want to see the "translated" speed of these apps though.

 

[bklement]

I just tried googling for progress on that but came up empty, just talk of Microsoft and Azul and others working on it. I expect we'll see OpenJDK first but it's unclear which versions will be Arm native.

I am surprised it's not ready yet, the linux arm version is out for years now.

 

[Jbusick7944]

Pardon my ignorance, but if it can do this, does this give hope that they'll be able to Bootcamp and have Windows on M1?

 

[anson42]

Pardon my ignorance, but if it can do this, does this give hope that they'll be able to Bootcamp and have Windows on M1?

That's a great question to ask someone at Microsoft. I can see bootcamp coming back, booting into ARM Windows, but isn't there an issue with ARM Windows not having the equivalent of Rosetta? Can you run Windows x86 binaries in ARM in the same way? Please excuse my ignorance on this... I'm not a Windows user at all but curious about that aspect of the ecosystem.

 

[justperry]

To translate an application as massive as word, in up to 20 seconds is quite impressive. ~2Gb of application data.

2 GB of data is not the binary.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Could not Apple translate the apps on the App Store and create universal binaries for the M1 chip?

That would save a lot of energy as opposed to translating on each client.

I would imagine a lot of the apps that will use Rosetta are mostly not downloaded from the app store.

 

[SBlue1]

Good to know. First thing I do when I get the new MacBook Air is to start every app I have installed.

 

[jdoyle]

Word already takes 20 seconds to launch. What's changed?

 

[Kabeyun]

Pardon my ignorance, but if it can do this, does this give hope that they'll be able to Bootcamp and have Windows on M1?

‘Fraid not. That is, yes. That is, different issues. Apple silicon won’t run Windows. Remains to be seen what the likes of VMWare & Parallels come up with down the road.

 

[Kabeyun]

Word already takes 20 seconds to launch. What's changed?

Hah! I guess what’s changed for you is that it’ll launch quicker on launches 2 through n.

 

[MacModMachine]

Word already takes 20 seconds to launch. What's changed?

god this is so true.....sometimes longer. my work mac takes like 30-40 seconds. best macbook pro they make too.

 

[Anony-mouse]

god this is so true.....sometimes longer. my work mac takes like 30-40 seconds. best macbook pro they make too.

Recent updates of Office for Mac has been really bad in this regard. Extended delay during app launch, including UI freezes on latest Mojave. I wonder what has changed.

 

[rjp1]

You'd think a daemon would be setup to translate all apps in the background. Why wait for you to invoke the application to finally translate it? Seems odd.

 

[Saturn007]

god this is so true.....sometimes longer. my work mac takes like 30-40 seconds. best macbook pro they make too.

Word already takes 20 seconds to launch. What's changed?

Ah, another reason I'm still rocking Word 2011 on 2015 and 2019 MBAs — On the 2015, the launch time is about 2 seconds. One, one thousand; two, one thousand; and I’m ready to type!

Excel is even faster!

On the 2019, both lift off even quicker — I can't even get past the “two” before I'm ready for action.

Alas, it seems that I must say goodbye to Office 2011 if I get a Silicon MBA. But 18 hour battery life is appealing!

 

[macbookfan]

god this is so true.....sometimes longer. my work mac takes like 30-40 seconds. best macbook pro they make too.

Seriously??? I just tried it on my MacBook Air 2020 (Intel). I counted 2-3 seconds.

 

[NetMage]

That being said, I'm wondering why they don't do this upon installation and just make the install process longer instead of doing it on first launch. Seems a bit off on the UI/UX considering after about 10 seconds, I just assume the darn thing crashed.

I thought initial stories said it would be done on installation, but perhaps that caused other issues with programs that do complicated tricks.

OTOH, you would think they would put up an indicator or banner stating "Rosetta 2 translation... please wait and contact your vendor for an Apple Silicon version" or something.

 

[amartinez1660]

20 seconds is about the same amount of time it takes me to launch and use most crappy electron-based apps.

A single 20 second wait for an automatic and near native binary? Bargain if you asked me.

And a tech feat of sorts. I don’t know much about how big the differences in architecture are... but to guarantee a 1:1 translation functional-wise of every operation I find it quite the achievement.

To translate an application as massive as word, in up to 20 seconds is quite impressive. ~2Gb of application data.

If that’s the whole Word package size, that would include a lot of images, icons, config files and general application data which I don’t see it being translated. The code base that runs all the logic is usually very small in comparison, 100MB maybe? That even still sounds big to me, but I have seen 50+MB dlls.

 

[cmaier]

This seems like a real non-issue in that it only happens once. However, I’m a bit surprised they didn’t go the one step further and pre-perform this translation during installation, as opposed to waiting for the user to attempt to launch the app.

They do.

But if the app is already installed, it won’t be translated until first launch.