Native ARM64 or universal binary version for macOS

[chanayane]

Currently, SecondLife (and other viewers like Firestorm) are only released as Intel x86_64 architecture on Mac. So newer Macs use Rosetta as a middleware to run SecondLife, at a performance cost, like with all emulators.

Most probably, the vast majority of SL users use Apple Silicon-based Macs. It has been a few years now since the switch to the new architecture.

x64_64 through Rosetta cannot offer the same level of performance than native ARM64 binaries.

Would it be possible to make an ARM64 release of Second-Life? Or at the very least, a universal binary release?

[chanayane]

If needed I can help to convert a few 3rd-party packages as universal binaries, provided that their source code is public, like curl, openjpeg, libpng....

[chanayane]

Just for reference. @RyeMutt started working on this on the WIP PR #3282

[chanayane]

I also saw that PR #3582