The current situation is as follows:
- Our main codebase, including the entire PCL development framework and all PixInsight modules, is standard C++17 with just a few exceptions. This means that it can be ported to run on ARM processors quite easily.
- The PixInsight core application depends on the
Qt framework. Currently we are using the latest Qt 5.15.3 LTS for the incoming version 1.8.8-8 of PixInsight, but Qt 5 does not support Apple Silicon processors. Full support of these processors on macOS will only be available in Qt 6. However, the current versions 6.0.x of Qt are just proofs of concept, completely useless for a large and complex application like PixInsight. Stable and complete support of Apple Silicon for all Qt modules (including
QtWebEngine, which is a port of the
Chromium browser) is supposed to arrive with Qt 6.2 by the end of this year. However, based on my experience of more than 15 years doing Qt-based development, I don't expect this to happen before Qt 6.5, to be realistic. This means from 1 to 1.5 years.
- Our JavaScript development platform (PJSR) uses
Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine. The SM version 24 that we are using in current versions of PixInsight is now obsolete and does not support ARM processors with the appropriate level of optimization. I am starting to port the entire PJSR to a current version of SpiderMonkey, but the amount of work required to complete this task is huge. It requires a complete rewrite of hundreds of thousands of lines of complex and extremely delicate source code. I need a lot of time to complete this task, especially considering that we have many other ongoing projects and priority tasks.
- PixInsight depends on many other open-source and proprietary libraries, including file format support libraries such as CFITSIO, LibTiff, LibRaw, etc, and several utility, numerical and hardware control libraries. All of these components must also be ported to run on Apple Silicon processors in a completely stable way. This ranges from very simple cases to quite complex ones, which will also require a lot of work.
To summarize: being realistic, don't expect a native Apple Silicon version of PixInsight to be released before one year, and probably more time, depending on how other third-party components evolve, especially Qt.
Then you have a strong dependency on a process that performs an extremely specialized task. This is not a good thing IMO. Image processing is much richer and more interesting than removing stars.