Finally compiling HISE locally on new MacBook!

[dannytaurus]

Some of you might remember my troubles compiling HISE on my 2020 M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM.

It was taking an hour to compile a debug version, if it finished at all - it usually crashed.

Seemed like the 8GB RAM limit was the issue, causing havoc with memory swap.

My solution then was to write a build script that builds my version of HISE using GitHub Actions, whenever I push a change live. It took about 15 minutes round trip to push a change, wait for the build, then download the build artefact to test the change.

I used this long-winded system to add features and fix bugs for the last few months. Painful!

Finally I upgraded to a 2024 M4 MacBook Air with 32GB RAM and I can now build debug HISE locally in 20 seconds! It's like a dream!

Just wanted to put this out there in case anyone else is having issues compiling on an 8GB MacBook.

[Chazrox]

@dannytaurus Yee! My macbook pro is maxed out so im good too but I’ve used a friends older slower computer for HISE and his is so slow I would’ve quit by now . Great tools make a huge difference! Congrats!

[Christoph Hart]

@Chazrox It‘s funny because it‘s really the 8GB that makes a difference. I have a 16GB Macbook Air M1 and the compile time for debug is around 40-60 seconds.

Protip: there‘s a Minimal Build scheme that you can select for a debug build that excludes some of the bigger third party dependencies for even faster compile time so if you don‘t need them you can use this for an even faster compile cycle.

[Chazrox]

@Christoph-Hart agreed. I have a M1 also with 64gb. I know you can store a whole app in memory with 16gbs, but i like to be over prepared

I run heavy multitracking sessions so I have to be ready. As far as HISE goes, never bogging.

[iamsteinco]

@dannytaurus how you get passed the issues with the 8gb bc I think im having similar issues. I have a 8gb ram for my intel mac like it gets stuck qt the end of the build

[dannytaurus]

@iamsteinco I'm afraid I didn't get around it on my Mac. I compiled HISE using GitHub Actions.

It's a bit of a process but I eventually got it so that every time I push to my HISE fork on GitHub, it built the app on the GitHub servers. I would then download the ZIP, un-zip it on my Mac and move the HISE.app to my Applications folder.

The 'real' solution was to get a Mac with more RAM. I recently got an M4 MacBook Air with 32GB RAM and it compiles HISE in about 30 seconds now - no sweat!

If you want me to send you the files I used to build HISE using GitHub Actions let me know.