Non ARC code in Apple Silicon

Does Apple Silicon support code without automatic reference counting?

Yes. ARC is architecture independent.

I am facing EXC_BAD_ACCESS errors in my app while running on arm64
architecture

There are many potential causes for this. The most common cause is that your code is relying on undefined behaviour (which is easier to do without ARC but still common even with ARC) that results in different behaviour on different platforms. To start you should run your app under the standard memory debugging tools to see if that flushes out anything relevant. If not, try TSan, because threading is an excellent source of undefined behaviour.

Do this first on Intel, so that you know that you’re starting from (what you think is) a known good baseline.

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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This issue only occurred while debugging the app. I was finally able to resolve it by changing

Edit Scheme -> Run -> Options -> GPU Frame Capture from Automatically Enabled to OpenGL ES.

Not sure why it worked.