Using RapidWright with a Mac

[parachu...@gmail.com]

Not sure where to post this, but I wanted a thread somewhere for others who might try to use RapidWright on a Mac.

The provided QTJambi libraries for Mac didn't work with the first few releases (errors when loading libraries).  And, I note that the Mac library is no longer distributed as a result.  However, I found that a work-around was deleting two of the jars and then finding and installing these two jars:

  qtjambi-4.6.3.jar

  qtjambi-macosx-gcc-4.6.3.jar

At least it worked to get the basic DeviceBrowser program to start up.  What is less clear is how the API differences between this version and 4.5.2 will affect other programs.

If anyone develops more experience with this, please post.

[HarnHua Ng]

Thank you for the workaround - works great on OS X 10.13.6.

Slightly off-topic - I ended up not using the DeviceBrowser or any RapidWright GUI programs, and just running everything in command-line fashion in Eclipse instead.

That has been working well so far, doing operations like reading an EDIF file that was written out by Vivado, and querying cells, nets and ports.

Parsing large EDIF files (~1.5M primitive cell instances) tend to cause the Java application to run out of memory, which I am temporarily resolving via an "-Xmx8g" argument.

However, it is good to have RapidWright working without needing to run it in a virtual machine.

[Syed Ahmed]

Leaving this note here if anybody's looking for a solution for MacOS Mojave. The workaround is overkill but if you absolutely need RapidWright in a macos, go ahead :) (I use two machines (macos and linux) and just needed it for logistics reasons).

- Setup: macOS Mojave.

- Download qt4 using macports (Note: qt4 from brew didn't work):

sudo port selfupdate

sudo port install qt4-mac

- git clone https://github.com/qtjambi/qtjambi.git

- cd qtjambi

- Find all instance of "1.5" and change it "1.7" in the repo (Note: including the inverted commas)

- export SDKROOT=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk

- export QTDIR=/opt/local/libexec/qt4

- env MAKEOPTS="-j4" ant all

- cp qtjambi-4.8.7.jar ~/workspace/code/RapidWright/jars/

 cp build/qtjambi-native-macosx-gcc-4.8.7.jar ~/workspace/code/RapidWright/jars/

- Change all instance of QApplication.exec() to QApplication.execStatic()

- Run with -XstartOnFirstThread in the java command.

Overkill isn't it? :) But yeah, if you don't need a GUI, don't bother. I'm just using the GUI to visually understand things.