Big Dorico will continue to use the Cubase Audio Engine which needs to be ported to ARM. It may be using some lower level APIs for efficiency, which would require a fair amount of work.
And I suspect that effort will still be led by the cubase team.
In fact we are not waiting for Qt 6.2 for ARM support. We’re not able to use Qt 6 yet for a variety of reasons, including some modules that we rely upon not yet being supported in Qt 6, and the dropping of support for ANGLE on Windows is problematic for us, since (if I am remembering it correctly) it means that Qt Quick UIs in mixed widgets/QML apps like Dorico, which are currently hardware accelerated by ANGLE, will end up relying on OpenGL support in Windows graphics card drivers, which is patchy to non-existent.
So we have been using Qt 5 both on iOS and on macOS, and have been running Dorico itself natively on Apple Silicon for the better part of a year. There are many other components that need to be updated to run natively on ARM beyond Dorico itself, but things are beginning to come together and I certainly expect that the next version of Dorico will have at least public beta-level support for Apple Silicon across the board.
We’ll revisit the Qt 6 decision after version 6.2 arrives and see what kind of state it’s in, but if the ANGLE issue remains, as seems likely, that pushes out the point at which we can adopt Qt 6 until we can migrate away from Qt Widgets altogether, which will be a very significant effort.
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That is interesting. From what I’ve seen on the QT site, they’re not focused on getting QT 5 working for M1. Nonetheless, I’m glad to hear it’s coming along.
No, they won’t be releasing ARM builds of Qt 5 for macOS. We maintain our own builds of Qt with a number of custom fixes and improvements, and certainly one of the more significant ones is that we are making Universal builds for x86 and ARM on macOS.
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Yum! Maybe this means High Sierra will be still supported for another year or so?
Paolo
No, unfortunately not, because Qt 5.15 requires macOS 10.14 Catalina or higher. Dorico 4 will not run on macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
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macOS 10.13 High Sierra is listed in the official QT 5.15 document, and I guess that Dorico 4 maybe using something specifically available in macOS 10.15 Catalina and later.
However, since you have typed macOS 10.14… is macOS 10.14 Mojave okay for running Dorico 4?
Yes, I beg your pardon, I mean macOS 10.14 Mojave. So far as I know Dorico 4 will not require Catalina. But we cannot make any guarantees ahead of time, and in any case we will very likely only officially support whatever is the current version of macOS released at the time of Dorico 4’s release, as is standard Steinberg policy.
That’s much better news! Even if not officially supported, if it works it will allow a longer transition time for those who can’t still abandon 32-bit software.
Paolo
The usual / main reason for vendors dropping support for a platform / version of an OS is because they upgraded their development tools and the tool vendor dropped support. Not usually anything to do with the new features of the OS being required. This is notation software after all. This happens unfortunately all the time. It’s a rock and a hard place for a vendor, as the tools go out of support so you need to use unsupported toolsets to keep building for old platforms.
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