Apple Silicon Tips for Engineers

How to develop software effectively on an Apple Silicon-based machine

Motivation

I am a happy owner of an Apple M1 Mac Mini and a user of a company issued M1 MacBook Pro. However there are certain caveats that those who use Apple Silicon hardware for development should be aware of in light of certain software being unavailable on Apple Silicon. Below are some tips a developer may use to develop efficiently on her ARM-based Mac.

Aarch64 and x64 versions of Homebrew can coexist

The aarch64 version of Homebrew lives in /opt/homebrew, while the x64 version can be installed to /usr/local. The following will setup x64 Homebrew and create ibrew (Intel brew) as an alias for it:

arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
alias ibrew="arch -x86_64 /usr/local/bin/brew"

Use the ibrew alias to install software that isn’t available on Apple Silicon:

ibrew tap adoptopenjdk/openjdkibrew install adoptopenjdk11