> Kind of embarrassing that it's taking some devs so long.. Steve Duda managed to get Serum updated within a couple months of the original M1 release.
This is seriously overstating things.
Steve has spent years continuously optimizing his code base. It was already clean and relatively free of cruft compared to code bases of similar age.
If you are developing on something like JUCE and don't have an extensive amount of optimized assembly or AVX instructions to deal with, yeah, porting is fast. Likewise if your suite uses a common framework (ala MeldaProduction, FabFilter, uHe, etc.).
NI's code base is not clean, and they have the organizational problem of developers coming, developing a product, and then leaving, orphaning the code base. Brian Clevinger is doing his own thing now with Rhizomatic, so good luck every seeing Absynth native. But NI has maintained active development of Kontakt because it is their cash cow, and thus their first native release. But Reaktor? Massive? Massive X? Nowhere in sight.
Further, like many developers, they have the added problem of VST3, which is a royal PITA to get right. Since Steinberg is trying to pull the rug out from all native VST2 development on M1, many larger developers like NI don't want to risk the potential lawsuits. They also have no choice but to push out native VST3s, since Cubase 12 does not support native VST2s.
So there are a lot of economic and technical pressures at work that you have to take into account.
I think I definitely misspoke here - I really didn't mean the devs so much as the companies that employ them. I know full well how difficult such a transition could be. Native Instruments has a ton of resources, and you'd think at the very least their most recent "flagship" synth Massive X would have seen an update by now.. which definitely points to organizational cruft more than anything. Most of the plugins I use that are created by smaller teams have already been updated.
The fact remains though that a loooot of producers use Macbook Pros, and I'm assuming many will be upgrading to M1s within the next couple years. I'm genuinely curious when the pressures will actually force these large organizations to take the transition seriously.
This is why I am very hopeful for the future of CLAP. It will give all developers a common format to target and test that can be wrapped in VST2/3/AU/AAX relatively easy. Since it has an ABI vs. and API interface, it is not subject to the vagaries of any one company's proprietary idea of how plugins will work. This will also make porting to new architectures easier.
VST2 used to be the standard development and testing target, which was then wrapped to other formats. But all of the developer workflows built around it are now at risk because of Steinberg's asshattery. I know for a fact that this has delayed a number of plugin releases, as developers have to put time into refactoring their code around a new standard target. Thank God for u-He and Bitwig leading the way here. I've tested the Surge XT CLAP build in Bitwig and it just works.
This is seriously overstating things.
Steve has spent years continuously optimizing his code base. It was already clean and relatively free of cruft compared to code bases of similar age.
If you are developing on something like JUCE and don't have an extensive amount of optimized assembly or AVX instructions to deal with, yeah, porting is fast. Likewise if your suite uses a common framework (ala MeldaProduction, FabFilter, uHe, etc.).
NI's code base is not clean, and they have the organizational problem of developers coming, developing a product, and then leaving, orphaning the code base. Brian Clevinger is doing his own thing now with Rhizomatic, so good luck every seeing Absynth native. But NI has maintained active development of Kontakt because it is their cash cow, and thus their first native release. But Reaktor? Massive? Massive X? Nowhere in sight.
Further, like many developers, they have the added problem of VST3, which is a royal PITA to get right. Since Steinberg is trying to pull the rug out from all native VST2 development on M1, many larger developers like NI don't want to risk the potential lawsuits. They also have no choice but to push out native VST3s, since Cubase 12 does not support native VST2s.
So there are a lot of economic and technical pressures at work that you have to take into account.