Description
We should set up CI on a machine running in Apple Silicon so we can run tests on native hardware to make sure it runs. Right now we only run CI on x86 machines (since that's the only option available in GitHub-hosted runners), which builds a cross-platform universal build, but doesn't allow us to actually test that the app works in Apple Silicon. There could be a lot of reasons how the Apple Silicon build could break (e.g. if the gettext
dependency got broken on the ARM side) and we should at least try to test that the app launches.
Also, currently building the cross-platform build is somewhat annoying because on x86 we have to manually grab the ARM builds of gettext and other libraries and link against them, since Homebrew will only grab the x86 versions. On Apple Silicon machines this could potentially be easier since we can use Rosetta 2 to run both x86 and ARM binaries on a single host.
Currently this is blocked by available runners GitHub provides so unless there is an easy and free way to host Apple Silicon CI runners this won't be available.
Part of #1136.