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Supported Platforms

Ben Fry edited this page Apr 25, 2022 · 13 revisions

4.0 beta 4 includes several updates to how different operating systems and hardware are handled. This allows us to add Apple Silicon (M1) support, and also better handles other devices like the Raspberry Pi.

The final decision is that a “variant” should consist of the OS name (windows, macos, or linux) followed by a the naming from the os.arch value returned by System.getProperty(). Because those names can vary across JDK implementations, we'll be using the name used by the JDK included with the Processing download, which is currently from Adoptium.

This new {os}-{arch} helps drastically simplify the code inside the PDE, and also gets us out of the business of deciding how to rename each platform. While the naming is sometimes awkward (i.e. macos-x86_64), the alternatives are inelegant as well, so we'll err on the side of simplicity by inheriting how the platform handles naming.

As a result of these changes, the subfolders used to identify native libraries for each platform are different. Old libraries will still work, but you're strongly encouraged to use these new names for clarity.

Hardware/OS os.arch bits 4.0 library folder name old library folder name download suffix
macOS (Intel 64-bit) aarch64 64 macos-aarch64 macos-aarch64
macOS (Apple Silicon) x86_64 64 macos-x86_64 macosx macos-x64
Windows (Intel 64-bit) amd64 64 windows-amd64 windows64 windows-x64
Linux (Intel 64-bit) amd64 64 linux-amd64 linux64 linux-x64
Linux (Raspberry Pi 32-bit) arm 32 linux-arm linux-armv6hf linux-arm32
Linux (Raspberry Pi 64-bit) aarch64 64 linux-aarch64 linux-arm64 linux-arm64

(The “bits” column is equivalent to sun.arch.data.model)

Technically, the Raspberry Pi releases may run on other ARM Linux installations, but they aren't tested that way. And the Raspberry Pi version includes additional libraries that are specific to the Pi. Put another way, generic Linux on ARM is not a supported platform, so we don't list it as “Linux (ARM 32-bit)” in places like Export to Application.

You can also view the Supported Platforms from 3.x, though half that information will be out of date.

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