Blockchain Adventures

Ready, Set, Solana! Getting Your M1 Mac Ready for Web3 dev with Solana and Rust

You’re ready to get going on blockchain. You’ve done your research (or maybe just went with something which looked interesting) and selected Solana to do your learning on.

Super cool! Solana is an amazing blockchain with a lot to recommend it. It’s blazingly fast, boasting one of the highest Transactions Per Second (TPS) at the time of writing. It’s written in Rust which is an elegant, beautiful and memory safe language.

You’ve made a great choice.

At the time of writing, Solana and M1 chips don’t play nicely together. I kept finding weird and annoying errors any time I tried to test my code. Here’s how I set up my Mac.

Here’s the error I got trying to run solana-test-validator and solana-test-validator --no-bpf-jit

zsh: illegal hardware instruction solana-test-validator

Here’s how to fix it.

Install Rosetta 2

Rosetta 2 is the interpretation layer for interpreting x86 instructions into ARM instructions. The good news is that Apple has done an excellent job with Rosetta 2. You’ll barely even notice you’re using it.

1. Go to your Utilities…