Julia AArch64 builds are now available on Travis CI

Announcements
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More exciting news for people who love cross-platform CI: Travis CI has recently added support for 64-bit ARM builds, and I’m pleased to announce that Julia is available out of the box on Travis ARM builds!

To get started, simply add arm64 as an arch value. Note that it’s only recognized for Linux; specifying arm64 for other os values gives you the default x86-64 build for that OS. To get around that we can just add a couple of exclude lines. You can see an example of this in action in this PR to one of my packages. Here is a corresponding Travis build for the PR showing the combinatorial explosion of systems, architectures, and Julia versions.

There are two important things to note for these builds. First, if it’s not already obvious, Travis’ terminology differs slightly from ours in that they call ARM64 what we call AArch64. So when you request arch: arm64 on Travis, you’re getting our official AArch64 binaries, the same that you’d get from the website. Second, and more imporantly, AArch64 is not considered a tier-1 platform. In particular, we don’t guarantee that AArch64 binaries will be available for any given version, and notably we do not have nightly binaries for AArch64. So you may want to consult Download Julia to ensure that binaries are indeed available for the Julia version you want to use.

Thanks to Hiro Asari (BonzaiMan) and Josh Kalderimis (joshk) from Travis for working with us on this.

Enjoy your build!

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Being a “naive” users, I don’t know what Travis CI is… One question on ARM support, though:

  • Are there any plans to support Windows 10 + ARM, e.g., the coming Surface Pro X?
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Surely you can find it out via a search engine?

This is completely unrelated to this topic.

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Yes, I could have googled Travis CI (or is it Travis Cl). Probably should have.

“Surface Pro X”… maybe unrelated, but I’m still curious about whether Julia could run on SPX and other ARM based machines running Win10.

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As far as I know, there are no plans to support Julia on ARM-based machines with operating systems other than Linux. There was a pull request to Julia a while back (0.7 era) that added support for FreeBSD ARM, but that ran into issues. If you’re interested in using Julia on Windows ARM, you’re welcome to try your hand at a pull request!

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Thanks for response. I’m not sure whether there is a market for this, but ARM based PCs with Windows 10 are starting to appear. It seems like they will support emulation of Win32, in addition to native applications for ARM (Office/MS applications + some Adobe applications, etc.). So it may be possible to run Julia 32 bit on them, but this would probably not be ideal. An alternative could be to use these PCs with TeamView or similar tools, and use them as terminals to more powerful computers.