[oefrha]

> And of course, Apple is not investing in these ports

What count as "investing in these ports"? Does submitting patches to CPython (and many other open source projects, including NumPy) for macOS 11 and Apple Silicon count? Here's a list of Apple-submitted PRs on python/cpython: https://github.com/python/cpython/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Al... Also some co-authored patches excluded by the search. See https://bugs.python.org/issue41100 for more related PRs. Your subsequent comments about IBM seem to imply that these do count.

I'm also curious about who's "we" in "we reached out to the python community about wheels and arm64".

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Edit: Forgot to say, arm wheels have been supported for many years now (not sure about the specific timeline of aarch64 support, but if 32-bit arm was supported I don't see why aarch64 wouldn't be). Maybe most famously there's https://www.piwheels.org/ for RPis. Are you talking about aarch64 support on PyPI/warehouse?

[smspf]

By investing in these ports I was thinking about any contribution that enables/improves arm64 support. So yes, PRs for python itself definitely qualify. However, the python ecosystem is not only python, there are lots of python packages that still lack arm64 optimizations or native arm64 support. Most of them work, being python, but every once in a while you'd run into a package that does not just work on arm64 without some tweaking.

In my case, "we" referred to the working group of ARM contractors working a very specific higher level project (at the time we were doing some cloud/openstack/k8s stuff, which indirectly required some python packages). Note that the way contractors were assigned to projects at the time implied that sometimes you'd run into overlaps, e.g. some packages we needed had already been ported by a different team of contractors for a different project a while back. Sometimes multiple teams would hit the same missing port at the same time, most of the time we could sync and team up by escalating that through the right channels, but sometimes we'd just end up duplicating work items and end up with two different sets of patches/ports.

About wheels, someone else in my team handled that, so I'm not that familiar with the issue - it might have been a particular package that was lacking arm64 wheels or it might have been impractical to use a different repository only for arm64 (in general we'd try avoiding using separate resources based on architecture and we definitely did prefer the arch-agnostic approaches, e.g. debian repository URLs are arch-independent, dockerhub manifests allowed using the same container image names etc.). We were interested PyPI at the time (couple of years ago), maybe the situation has improved meanwhile, but we just accepted compilation at install time as a good enough solution.