Running semgrep on Apple M1 ARM system

[mschwager]

The new Apple M1 chips are ARM-based. Currently, our OCaml binaries are compiled for x86-64. It seems the new M1 chips have x86 emulation under something called Rosetta 2, so things may Just Work. Regardless, we should test things out to ensure they do.

[underyx]

I believe @fallion (@Capchase) is using an M1 chip and he might have already been running Semgrep on his machine.

[aryx]

OCaml has also been recently ported to this new archi/os, so we should be able to produce native binaries for it.

[aryx]

related also: #2252

[DrewDennison]

r2c doesn't have an new M1 macs yet 😢 but I believe we could test this with arm docker images but would love a PR or help from anyone in the community with ARM compilation experience. 🙏

[brendongo]

Haven't tested on an M1 mac yet but 0.43.0 on homebrew included building on ARM Homebrew/homebrew-core#73280

[aryx]

related slack issue? https://r2c-community.slack.com/archives/CK86BJ5DW/p1617739952157800

[brendongo]

Semgrep on Rosetta x86-64 emulation seems to be working fine but the ARM build from homebrew seems stuck when running on juice-shop and p/security-audit

[thypon]

Same error here

[tino]

How can I build semgrep-core on an M1? I have no experience with OCaml.

We've set up semgrep with pre-commit, but I run into:

OSError: [Errno 8] Exec format error: '/Users/tino/.cache/pre-commit/repo_6jxvknx/py_env-python3.9/lib/python3.9/site-packages/semgrep/bin/semgrep-core'

If I know how to build semgrep-core I can swap that out and see if it works.

[aryx]

Hopefully @tino we can build an homebrew m1-compatible package very soon.

Regarding compiling OCaml projects on M1, according to https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-for-arm-macos/6019/23 the OCaml package manager OPAM now handles correctly M1.
So brew install opam should work
From there forllow the instructions in CONTRIBUTING.md to compile semgrep-core.