CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javamacosuniversal-binary
trainrobbery
trainrobbery

Reputation: 539

How to create a mac universal binary with bundled JRE?

I am creating a JAVA desktop app for Mac computers, using jpackage to bundle the desired JRE into the app and finally shipping a .app to the customers.

With the new m1 apple arm silicon computers I do not want to create different apps for each processor architecture with the right JRE (intel & arm) but create one single universal binary app that launches the Intel JRE on Intel computers and the Arm JRE on Arm computers. I know this is possible somehow.

I tried to create two .apps and use the lipo tool from the mac command line, but this doesn't really work.

Any suggestions how to proceed?

Upvotes: 8

Views: 1184

Answers (2)

trainrobbery
trainrobbery

Reputation: 539

So I followed this very detailed tutorial:

https://incenp.org/notes/2023/universal-java-app-on-macos.html

After some minor little changes it works perfectly on Intel (with Mac OS 11) and Apple chip (with Mac OS 14). I tried all three options but will use the last one with 2 threads.

I compiled the file on the machine with the older operating system.

Two small remarks: The function get_application_directory needs to be fixed a little bit:

static char * get_application_directory(char *buffer, uint32_t len)
{
    char *last_slash = NULL;
    int n = 2;

    if ( ! _NSGetExecutablePath(buffer, &len) ) {
        while ( n-- > 0 ) {
            if ( (last_slash = strrchr(buffer, '/')) )
                *last_slash = '\0';
        }

    }

    return last_slash ? buffer : NULL;
}

and the reference of the jars on the classpath only work when I put every single jar file on the classpath and not use any wildcard *.

To debug you can always call this method that will print any exception the JVM is throwing:

void check_and_print_exception(JNIEnv *env) {
    if ((*env)->ExceptionCheck(env)) {
        (*env)->ExceptionDescribe(env);
        (*env)->ExceptionClear(env);
    }
}

Upvotes: 1

Christopher Bruno
Christopher Bruno

Reputation: 21

I took the Zulu Intel and arm JRE (not JDK) builds and lipo'ed the binaries. You can run the script using your generated JRE bundle (you would just need to run jpackage on an Intel and ARM computer to get the appropriate runtimes for each architecture ).

Github repo:

https://github.com/ChristopherBruno78/universal_jre

Tested on intel and arm macOS 13 Ventura.

Upvotes: 2

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