I've ported Extempore to ARM64, LLVM 21, C++17

[blade]

As the title says, over the weekend I decided to give Extempore an overhaul and port it to ORC JIT, ARM64 and all that. Selfishly motivated by my switch to Apple Silicon and the desire to use ARM64 libs.

All tests are passing, and my own projects all seem to run just fine on my machine. Graphics and audio work great, and are noticeably more performant without Rosetta overhead.

I know this was on the wishlist for a long time, so I was planning to clean things up and submit PRs this week, but I noticed Andrew said in a recent thread that Extempore should be considered archived.

That's sad news,  but understandable. Extempore requires a lot of work to maintain and there are many competing environments today with lower learning curves. But Extempore/xtlang still has a lot of untapped potential, and I think the environment is still worth hacking on.

Would it be better to just fork, or are these PRs still welcome?

What's the maintenance plan for Extempore long term? I don't mind forking, if Andrew & Ben have grown tired of maintaining Extempore. I had a few more enhancements planned.

If forking is the best option, what are your feelings regarding the Extempore brand, documentation, etc? Would you prefer a partial or full name change?

[blade]

What is the general positioning of Extempore with respect to other environments which have popped up, some of them entirely web-based? Do Andrew or Ben feel that these other environments meet the needs of most Extempore users? Or is archiving Extempore simply a matter of available resources?

[Ben Swift]

Hey there

That's *super cool*, thanks. I'll take a look asap.

To answer your immediate question, pull requests are still welcome, so no need to fork just yet (although obviously you're always welcome to fork - MIT and all that).

Cheers
Ben

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[Ben Swift]

I can't speak for Andrew, but from my perspective I have a "let 1000 flowers bloom" attitude towards other livecoding environments. As Alex says, we're not trying to make the future of music. We're just humans messing around.

So I think they can all co-exist happily. The Extempore situation is much more of a resources thing.

Ben

On Sun, 07 Dec 2025 at 09:56 PM +1000, blade wrote:

[George]

Blade & Ben

Sounds good to me! Especially the graphics working.

I'm still on an Intel MacBook - wasn't aware that Extempore didn't run on newer versions.

But thinking of updating soon so good news.

Keep alive & well

George

[Andrew Sorensen]

Very impressed that you got this done in a weekend.  I’ll have a quick look over the PR when I have a moment but will otherwise let you and Ben get on with it.

Nice work!

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extemporelang/9ded29e6-0e7a-4d7d-a2ad-991e6af8bd8dn%40googlegroups.com.

[blade]

Hacked it in a weekend at least, but it could still use another quality and performance pass, I probably screwed something up... I'm new to LLVM.

I made a draft PR, but I've been sick this week so I haven't finished committing everything from my local repo  yet.

And thanks for answering my questions, Ben. I'll send out an update once I mark the PR final. Today is a busy day so we'll see if any progress is made.

[Ben Swift]

No worries, I'll put aside some time next week to look at it.

To be honest I think the "multi-platform test" GitHub actions stuff that I set up a while ago has bit-rotted as well, so I'll try and update that (because while it's great to get the arm64 stuff working, we need to make sure it still builds in other places).

So it might sit on a brach for a little bit while we road test it, but I do want to say thanks (in advance) for giving it a go :)

Cheers
Ben

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