When it comes to compiler support for Apple Silicon and their hardware at large, Apple has long been focused on the LLVM/Clang toolchain given their long history with it, employing many of the developers, and Xcode being based on LLVM. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) though may soon see upstream support for the newer Apple Cores thanks to the work of GCC developer Iain Sandoe along with the input of engineers from Arm and the Apple open-source team.
Recently posted to the GCC patches mailing list was the newest revision of the initial implementation of Apple Cores support for GCC on AArch64 Darwin (macOS). This adds new compiler targets for the apple-m1, apple-m2, and apple-m3 along with the A12 SoC via apple-a12.
So should you want to be running GCC on macOS with Apple Silicon, it’s looking like this patch for the “Apple Cores” support could soon be merged for targeting the capabilities of these ARM CPU cores.
From the Arm side at least the latest version looks good and unblocks others from potentially providing their sign-offs. It’s possible this Apple Cores support for GCC could still be merged at the last minute ahead of the GCC 15.1 compiler stable release due out in the coming weeks. We’ll see if this patch manages to make it in time for the GCC 15 compiler release or if it’s diverted into GCC 16 Git. In any event it’s coming for those wanting to see optimized Apple Silicon support with GCC as an alternative to LLVM.
