I read some threads about the topic, but they didn't solve my problems, so I sum up here what helped me.
My project is trying to compile SoftRF to NodeMCU 1.0
My Mac runs on OSX 10.15 Catalina.
Download and Install of Arduino 1.8.10 works fine, can compile for Arduino standard boards (check).
When compiling for my project, I get the reported error "panic ..." very early in the process (see forum).
In the forum, many problems of that kind seem to be solved by using Arduino 1.8.9, so I tried that as well:
- compiling worked for a long time, but at the end I get the error indicating that ctags is a 32 bit executable, while Catalina only supports 64bit => I copied the version from 1.8.10 directory tree, and could pass that compile step successfully now
cd /Applications/Arduino1.8.9.app/Contents/Java/tools-builder/ctags/5.8-arduino11
cp /Applications/Arduino1.8.10.app/Contents/Java/tools-builder/ctags/5.8-arduino11/ctags .
[in order to make above commands work for you, you need to change the folder names in /Applications to include the revision number of Arduino in the Finder application]
- but then the next problem appeared that Arduino board tools cannot find python3. I changed the symbolic link in ~/Library/Arduino15/packages/esp8266/tools/python3/3.7.2-post1 to point to the result of "which python3" command and bingo, my project compiles.
cd ~/Library/Arduino15/packages/esp8266/tools/python3/3.7.2-post1
rm python3
ln -s /usr/bin/python3 .
So now I have a manually modified Arduino1.8.9 folder that can compile my NodeMCU program (SoftRF)