Three Platforms and an Old Laptop

​Ooloi runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Each platform gets its own self-contained bundle, built separately on a machine running the target architecture natively. You download the one for your platform. It works.

On Windows and Linux there's nothing remarkable to report. On the Mac, however, Ooloi ships an Apple Silicon bundle. No Intel Mac support. This isn't controversial by any means; every Mac user knows this transition happened – no new Intel Mac has been manufactured since 2020, Apple classified the 2017 models as 'vintage' in 2024, and Rosetta 2 is being removed in macOS 28. There's a deeper reason specific to JVMs that makes Intel bundles on Apple Silicon particularly problematic, but the practical reality is simpler: Apple Silicon is where the Mac is, and it's where Ooloi's audience overwhelmingly already is.

As it happens, I develop Ooloi on a 2017 Intel MacBook Pro. There's a point to using old hardware: if there are bottlenecks in the architecture, they show up sooner. A machine that's nine years old and was never fast by today's standards will punish you for inefficiency in ways a current machine won't.

So far, I haven't seen any. This says more about Clojure's architecture than it does about the laptop. The 2017 MacBook Pro has been a surprisingly honest development partner. But you never know, moving forward.

When the deeper Skia rendering work starts – GPU-accelerated layout, real-time scrolling through large scores – I'll likely have to move to my 2024 M3 MacBook Pro, but not just for speed: Skia's GPU path on macOS is moving from deprecated OpenGL to Metal, and Metal is where Apple Silicon lives natively. As an added benefit, early benchmarks (which I've posted here before) already show a two-to-three-times speedup on CPU-bound work, and later processors like the M4 and M5 push that even further. If Metal delivers what it should, large orchestral scores won't need an overdimensioned workstation to scroll and edit smoothly.

The full technical analysis, including the JVM-under-Rosetta performance data and a four-case architecture matrix, is in ADR-0050: Platform Support Policy.