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

[ArPe]

This probably sounds like news for newbies, but Rosetta always did this. It also happened on DEC Alpha machines running Windows NT in the late 90s when they had to run x86 apps.

Don’t know why NetMage disagreed with this post above. It’s 💯 factually true even if the caching method has a change.

 

[gnasher729]

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.

About the same size as the original code. And note that for many applications, the code is only a small part of the complete package; there will be images and potentially huge video files inside an application, and they won't be duplicated. If you don't have much free space then you should buy a Mac with a bigger SSD drive, but in reality one GB will allow you translating lots of apps.

 

[gnasher729]

Right. Makes no sense to store. There‘s no going back to anything except your old notebook.

Actually, I can store applications on an external drive, and plug that drive into different Macs. With Intel and ARM processors. Anyone doing that would be rightfully annoyed if they plugged their hard drive into an M1 Mac, launched an app once, and then it doesn't work on their Intel processor anymore.

But there is a much better reason to keep the old Intel version: Rosetta isn't going to stay the same, but Apple will improve it. So if you install a new macOS version with an improved Rosetta and launch a translated Intel app, it will be translated again to run faster.

 

[gnasher729]

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?

It is not impossible. It won't be done by Apple, so it will depend on how much money someone expects to make from this.

In the late 90's, early 2000's there were two emulators, SoftWindows and Virtual PC, running Windows on a PowerPC. They took 32 bit Intel instructions and translated them to 32 bit PowerPC code. Someone could do the same thing today. Windows 10 64 bit is supposed to take 20 GB of hard drive space, so that's not a big problem. How much programming effort and therefore the development cost, and how much speed you get, is very closely related.

So in the extreme case, that you buy a MacBook Air just to run Windows, some company would have to put an awful lot of effort into it to run this at good speed. I think that's unlikely. If you need to run just one application that isn't very demanding, that could be built with much less effort and wouldn't run very fast. In either case, you'd need a license for Windows.