using xPerm on Mac with Apple M2 chip and Rosetta

[James Mossman]

This was crafted with help of Claude.  I am using xPerm inside some other code, and also MathLink wolframscript.  Not a fatal error, but I thought I would pass this along.

The `xperm.mac` external binary shipped with xPerm 1.2.4 reliably crashes with `SIGABRT` (heap-corruption abort)

during MathLink shutdown when running under Rosetta translation on macOS 26.3.

Computation completes and results are returned correctly — the crash occurs after final output, during the binary's exit cleanup

— so the practical impact is cosmetic (stderr noise, occasional non-zero process exit).

However, macOS is logging a new crash report every time it happens,

and the diagnostic signature is consistent across 26+ crashes spanning one week of normal usage,

so something real is being caught by the system's malloc guard.

Running on MacStudio with M2 chip

very one of the 26 crash reports at `~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/xperm.mac-*.ips` has the identical fingerprint:

- **Signal**: `SIGABRT` (`EXC_CRASH`, code 6, "Abort trap")

- **Trigger**: `abort() called` in `libsystem_c.dylib`, raised by `malloc_zone_error` / `malloc_vreport`

(macOS malloc guard detected heap corruption)

- **Faulting thread**: `"ML-SyncObject-Background-Thread"`

[Leo Stein]

Dear James,

Does the SIGABRT still happen if you use a native arm binary? See the thread https://groups.google.com/g/xAct/c/0APu0h7R2Nk for instructions on how to compile natively (or use Alfonso's precompiled binaries).

Best

Leo

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[James Mossman]

Thanks for the link -- I will check it out