Reply To: arm64 Framework Slice?

[wfilleman]

Hi Halle,

Thanks for the response and congrats on your new iPhone 5S!

Yes, agreed on all points. I could remove arm64 from the valid architectures list and release, however, here’s my reasons for supporting the arm64 slice:

– All current and future high-end iPhones and iPads (maybe even the mini at some point) will be using the new 64-bit chip.
– 64-bit uses the the new, redesigned 64-bit iOS frameworks. Object creation is about half the time and there are many fixes (read fixed memory leaks) here still affecting the 32-bit frameworks.
– If your app supports 64-bit, iOS doesn’t have to load in the 32-bit framework. This give more memory availability to your app.
– My app deals with heavy real-time video processing from multiple sources. The performance boost I’m seeing with arm64 is very significant.
– My user base is already at > 75% iOS7. iOS 5 is less than 2%. My next app update will only support iOS 7. Older users can always download the latest available for their device. But any new features (like voice) will be an iOS 7 only feature for my app.

I do use a host of other libraries where most have converted to offering an arm64 slice (however, I am still waiting on one other library to make the conversion). I’ve seen these other libraries do it a multitude of ways. Some have found a way to support back to 4.3 in one library.a file. Other’s have opted to release 2 frameworks, one that targets iOS 5 and below and another that targets iOS 6 and up (including arm64).

With arm64, there are some great reasons to support it, but I do sympathize and agree that supporting a new slice with the backwards compatibility restrictions can be difficult.

Thanks for all that you do. I’ve been playing with the demos (including Rejecto) and I’ve VERY impressed with what this on-device speech recognizer can do and I’m really looking forward to offering this as an upsell feature to my apps.

Thanks!
Wes