I really like the 2.0 IDE. I was always fine with the previous but 2.0 is a major improvement and very welcome.
All works fine for me on Apple M1. However it uses Rosetta 2. Not so much of an issue but it then means a very bulky binary and even larger GPU helper - combined they can consume more than 1GB of memory. That is getting into footprint of other IDEs I won't mention
Given there are builds for Raspberry PI for Arduino IDE and these are ARM are there any plans to have an Apple native build of IDE?
Hi @agregson. Thanks for taking the time to give the Arduino IDE 2.0.0 release candidate a try!
This request is tracked by the Arduino IDE developers here:
The biggest challenge is that the "GitHub Actions" service used to produce the Arduino IDE builds does not provide hosted Apple M1 runner machines:
There are of course ways to work around this, but we have not had any reports of problems with using the x86-64 builds via Apple's Rosetta 2 and my understanding is that the performance is generally pretty good when using applications in this manner.
Unfortunately, there are not currently any official Linux ARM builds of Arduino IDE 2.x (only Arduino IDE 1.x has official builds for these host architectures):
I never thought about the GitHub build. Shame they do not offer ARM builds.
I wonder would it be possible to add to home-brew and build on install from source? I suppose I could build it manually but brew makes builds so handy - and packages up a decent uninstall/zap also.
It works ok in Rosetta. A little sluggish. But then I find most IDE and especially those that use Electron to be sluggish - along with those based on Java. Also incredible memory consumers. VSCode is terrible for this. Shame so much now uses Electron as it sort of puts me off. Also apps that rely on Rosetta I tend to move away from. I find they consume a lot of memory, are harder on battery and often feel a little slow (though that may be perception/prejudice!).
May have a look and see how I can use platformIO or Arduino-cli (does it suffer from same apple build issue) and see if there is any way around it.
Also had an idea ... a headless Pi4 could be used to host the Arduino IDE. At a push VNC would connect but may have a look and see if I can remotely deliver app Windows via X. Just a thought ... It would be even better if the app could run in remote server and deliver the UI locally - just not in a bloated webapp as the cloud IDEs that exist for PlatformIO and similar are similar memory and resource hogs.
Thanks again for super work. I love Arduino. Now use almost nothing else given the wide range of hardware and I always buy genuine as I like the quality, reliability and dependability. Combined with Adafruit addons it is a very comprehensive solution and I also like to think buying genuine supports the libraries and developments (I am never happy to see third party clone boards linking to libraries of Adafruit or Arduino )
But by its nature Arduino CLI is lightweight compared to Arduino IDE so it is likely you wouldn't notice a significant difference in performance between a native build and the x86-64 builds of Arduino CLI provided by Arduino.
Arduino CLI is already available from Homebrew, and Arduino is involved in the maintenance of the Arduino CLI Homebrew formulae, so it is not so prone to falling behind as has been common with the 3rd party Linux packages for Arduino development software.
In addition to Arduino, there have been some community efforts on providing ARM Linux builds of Arduino IDE 2.x. You can find some information on that in the GitHub issue I shared in my previous reply and maybe some additional information here.
I had noticed the brew formula. Quick check on the script shows it appears to have bottles for intel and arm binary. When installed a check with file shows
It certainly performs very well and is very light on memory. That is a plus and will now look to integrate into VIM as that could work well for me.
Reassuring to know there is official maintenance of the formula as so many can fall away.
The 1.X IDE is a lot lighter on memory - 600MB on Rosetta2. IDE 2.X seems incredibly resource intensive. Just opening the app results in Arduino IDE task at 400MB, IDE Helper (GPU) at 70MB, IDE Helper (Renderer) at 500MB and a bunch of others that add up to over 1000MB. My MacVIM is just under 18MB (and all the plugins and config I need). My terminal VIM with the same plugins is just under 10MB. Maybe things have moved on from my days looking at apps and code
I will have a proper look at CLI. I had been thinking of PlatformIO but I prefer Arduino tools and I now use genuine Arduino boards almost exclusively for my projects so might as well remain with official tools.
Thanks again. Super range of boards and tools lately.
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