Will Java run on ARM?
Thread poster: Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
Jun 14, 2020

Regarding Apple’s announced switch to ARM processors: will Java run on them?

 
Rodolfo Raya
Rodolfo Raya  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:08
English to Spanish
iPad with keyboard Jun 14, 2020

A Mac with ARM processor is an iPad with keyboard. It does not run Java today.

There are 32bit versions of Java for Linux on ARM.

Regards,
Rodolfo


Jorge Payan
 
Wolfgang Schoene
Wolfgang Schoene  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 16:08
Member
English to German
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iPad with keyboard Jun 14, 2020

Does that mean we have to keep Intel-Macs on stock in order to run our CAT tools? And I suppose Parallels / VMWare will be a no-go.

 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
FB Jun 14, 2020

Wolfgang Schoene wrote:

Does that mean we have to keep Intel-Macs on stock in order to run our CAT tools? And I suppose Parallels / VMWare will be a no-go.


See Mac for Translators on FB. If you don’t have access, let me know.


 
Erik Freitag
Erik Freitag  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 16:08
Member (2006)
Dutch to German
+ ...
No FB Jun 14, 2020

Hans Lenting wrote:

Wolfgang Schoene wrote:

Does that mean we have to keep Intel-Macs on stock in order to run our CAT tools? And I suppose Parallels / VMWare will be a no-go.


See Mac for Translators on FB. If you don’t have access, let me know.


Dear Hans,

I'd be interested in this topic, too - but I don't have (nor plan to have) a FB account... Maybe you could sum up the information in a word or two?

Many thanks!


Wolfgang Schoene
 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
FB Jun 14, 2020

From MacRumors, discussion section:

Has anyone heard rumors about how this might affect virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare?
An ARM Mac will not be able to virtualise or dual-boot x86 operating systems like Windows.

It would be possible to run x86 windows under software emulation - the result would look identical to VMWare or Parallels but wouldn't have the same performance - back in the PPC days we had things like SoftWindows - which, basically, were better than nothing for running business/productivity software but pretty sluggish.

CPUs and emulation technology have moved on since then so If you need to run 20-year-old legacy software then it could be workable.

You can find YouTube videos of people running full x86 MacOS on an iPad using emulation - it's not good, but then they're using an open-source emulator tat probably hasn't been optimised for either iPad or MacOS so it's kinda impressive that it runs at all. ARM Macs should be rather faster than iPads with more RAM etc.

The alternative would be to run Windows for ARM (which includes an x86 emulator) - that would require co-operation between MS and Apple and/or Parallels/VMWare, and there are some technical questions, but it disnae break the laws o'physics Captain. That could give better performance than the current MS ARM offering on what native ARM Windows apps exist - and should also be a better way of running x86 Windows apps, because only the application code needs to run under emulation (rather than the whole Windows OS).

Ditto for Linux: emulation (slow) or Linux for ARM. The difference is that ARM Linux is pretty well developed and most of the major packages/open source projects already work fine on ARM: Unix/Linux has a culture of hardware-platform independent source code and, since most of the major packages are open source, if the developer can't be bothered to build ARM versions then someone else probably will.

...but the days of running demanding Windows x86 games and Pro apps on a Mac are probably numbered.


Lennart Luhtaru:
I’m sure parallels will find a way to either still emulate x86/64 VMs with good enough performance or they’ll just start selling you access to cloud VMs. This is also what people developing for Mac sometimes do currently (just rent access to remote Mac minis at macstadium.com for example). But I personally would just buy a separate win machine and RDP to it locally if parallels can’t figure out how to get decent emulation performance out of ARM. Regarding Windows for ARM, wouldn’t it be double emulation then? Win ARM emulating x86 to run regular win applications and then parallels emulating Windows on MacOS? Would it actually be better? Anyway, competition and innovation is good. Intel has been doing too little for quite a few years now. And I don’t think PPC nightmares will come back.


 
Rodolfo Raya
Rodolfo Raya  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:08
English to Spanish
Migrating CATs out of Java Jun 14, 2020

Wolfgang Schoene wrote:

Does that mean we have to keep Intel-Macs on stock in order to run our CAT tools? And I suppose Parallels / VMWare will be a no-go.


You don't have to give up the move to an ARM-based Mac. CAT tools evolve all the time and will be available on future Macs too.

Migration of CAT tools from Java to JavaScript has already begun. New Macs will still have some version of Safari or Chrome. That's enough for running a CAT tool.

Regards,
Rodolfo


 
Rodolfo Raya
Rodolfo Raya  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:08
English to Spanish
JavaScript tools Jun 14, 2020

Rodolfo Raya wrote:

Migration of CAT tools from Java to JavaScript has already begun. New Macs will still have some version of Safari or Chrome. That's enough for running a CAT tool.


And I don't mean a web-based CAT tool, I mean a tool runing locally on macOS that has a UI written in HTML + JavaScript

Rodolfo


 
Wolfgang Schoene
Wolfgang Schoene  Identity Verified
France
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English to German
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JavaScript tools Jun 14, 2020

Rodolfo Raya wrote:

Rodolfo Raya wrote:

Migration of CAT tools from Java to JavaScript has already begun. New Macs will still have some version of Safari or Chrome. That's enough for running a CAT tool.


And I don't mean a web-based CAT tool, I mean a tool runing locally on macOS that has a UI written in HTML + JavaScript

Rodolfo


So I guess you're already in the starting blocks, Rodolfo...


 
Rodolfo Raya
Rodolfo Raya  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:08
English to Spanish
Already migrating Jun 14, 2020

Wolfgang Schoene wrote:

So I guess you're already in the starting blocks...


Migration has started. Stingray, TMXEditor and XLIFF Manager are hybrid JavaScript-Java open source applications. The UIs are written in JavaScript and the backend are still in Java but moving to JavaScript when necessary.

Swordfish IV is already being converted to JavaScript and open-sourced. Code is available at Github.com.

Regards,
Rodolfo


 
Hans Lenting
Hans Lenting
Netherlands
Member (2006)
German to Dutch
TOPIC STARTER
Further reading Jun 14, 2020

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/arm-macs/

 
Peter Kovacik
Peter Kovacik  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 10:08
Arabic to English
Java might be possible Jun 18, 2020

I have used OmegaT, which is written in Java, on an ARM processor. My Raspberry Pi 4 uses ARMv8 Cortex-A72 architecture and has the Linux distro Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian). OmegaT works fine on it, so most likely the scenario is that Apple does not support Java on iOS rather than it not being possible. Also, Mac uses macOS rather than iOS, so maybe Apple will support Java for macOS.

Rodolfo Raya wrote:
You don't have to give up the move to an ARM-based Mac. CAT tools evolve all the time and will be available on future Macs too.

Migration of CAT tools from Java to JavaScript has already begun. New Macs will still have some version of Safari or Chrome. That's enough for running a CAT tool.


I have recently begun going through some tutorials for the Electron framework. It is used to make cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript using Chromium for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. Some of the applications built with Electron include Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Teams, and Skype, but I don’t think it would be the right solution for every app. There are more options for builiding cross platform apps than just using Java or JavaScript.


 
Rodolfo Raya
Rodolfo Raya  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:08
English to Spanish
Java is available for Macs with Apple silicon Dec 1, 2020

Java is already available for Macs with the new M1 processors at https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu-community/?os=macos&architecture=arm-64-bit&package=jdk

Regards,
Rodolfo


 
Rodolfo Raya
Rodolfo Raya  Identity Verified
Local time: 12:08
English to Spanish
Swordfish IV is now a native Apple Silicon app May 3, 2021

Hi,

Starting with version 4.4.0, Swordfish IV is now available for download as a native app for Apple Silicon.

The traditional build for Intel chips runs fine under Rosetta emulation, but the new native ARM64 build is much faster on M1 Macs.

The difference in speed between native and emulated apps on M1 Macs is huge.

Regards,
Rodolfo


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:08
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Cafetran May 3, 2021

So will CafeTran run on the new Macs?

 


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Will Java run on ARM?






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