[Vm-dev] No more support for running 64-bit VM on macOS < 10.13?

[Tim Johnson]

Hi,

Is running the 64-bit VM now unsupported on anything less than macOS 
(nee OS X) 10.13 or 10.14?  Perhaps because of the Metal changes and 
OpenGL deprecation...?

I just compiled the 64-bit VM[1] fresh and tried running it on my 
10.12.6 system.  I got a Squeak window with no graphics inside (just 
blackness) and a message on my terminal console:

2019-03-21 10:58:55.324 Squeak[70669:4778174] Pipeline state creation 
error: Function screenQuadFragmentShader is using language version 2.1 
which is incompatible with this OS.

If so, I may need to make a choice between:

- upgrading my operating system,
- using the 32-bit VM (though my image is 64-bit),
- staying on an older VM version (though I leave it running for many 
days and its memory usage balloons from ~313 megabytes to multiple 
gigabytes, perhaps due to the event handling memory leak bug, which I 
was hoping to leave behind).

I wonder if it would be worth the effort to handle this situation 
gracefully rather than bringing up a non-functioning environment which 
requires a force-quit.  Perhaps this could be easily accomplished by 
including the proper minimum OS version in the Info.plist of the 64-bit 
app bundle and letting macOS do the work of disallowing a launch on 
older OS versions.

Thanks,
Tim J



[1] build.macos64x64/squeak.cog.spur