[R-SIG-Mac] R, FORTRAN and Apple Silicon

[Jim Hester]

I recently inquired about the progress of gcc (more specifically gfortran)
support with Apple's new 'Apple Silicon' architecture. [0]

As of today it seems gfortran is not available natively, which has
implications for R support on upcoming Apple hardware.

Subsequently I have been in email contact with a few people at Apple on
their progress and wanted to update those here.

They also have some questions on what features we rely on in the R
community that I thought some on this mailing list would have better
insight in answering than I.

I would be happy to give the apple contacts information off-list, or CC you
into the email thread if you would like. Alternatively I can communicate
our answers back to them myself.

Also I have a Developer Transition Kit at home, so I can run tests if it
would be beneficial.

Apple's response follows

> We've been working with Iain on figuring out a path forward for gfortran,
they recently published a branch
https://github.com/iains/gcc-darwin-arm64#readme with some early support in
gcc. We are aware of some of the issues with FP80 vs FP64 and our last
internal discussion was trying to ascertain how relevant and important FP80
is in the fortran community. There are some complexities with FP80 (and
higher) that are going to make it not very timely, even native, on Apple
silicon. If we could set aside FP80+ as not critical it would allow us to
focus on FP64. What are your thoughts?

> I think we are able to support technical discussions if people have
questions and we've made hardware available to individuals as
needed/requested as well.

> I did see those tweets when they were posted, we'd already been
discussing Fortran with several vendors that depend on it, like Matlab.  It
would also be good to understand example workloads that are important so we
can take a look at them on Rosetta today, since any effort to go native
will likely rely on some period of Rosetta as a fall back and we'd like to
ensure thats feasible.

[0]: https://twitter.com/jimhester_/status/1292821727165194240

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