To use new features available from master or branches, which have not made it into a official stable release yet.
Homebrew builds of Emacs are not self-contained applications, making it very difficult when doing HEAD builds and you need to rollback to a earlier version.
Both Homebrew HEAD builds, and nightly builds from emacsformacosx.com are built from the master branch. This script allows you to choose any branch, tag, or git ref you want.

Status

As of writing (2020-08-19) it works for me on my machine. Your luck may vary.

I have successfully built:

emacs-27.1 release git tag
master branch (Emacs 28.x)
feature/native-comp branch (Emacs 28.x)

For reference, my machine is:

13-inch MacBook Pro (2020), 10th-gen 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 (4c/8t)
macOS 10.15.6 (19G2021)
Xcode 11.6

Limitations

The build produced does have some limitations:

It is not a universal application. The CPU architecture of the built application will be that of the machine it was built on.
The minimum required macOS version of the built application will be the same as that of the machine it was built on.
The application is not signed, so running it on machines other than the one that built the application will yield warnings. If you want to make a signed Emacs.app, google is you friend for finding signing instructions.

Requirements

Xcode
Homebrew
All Homebrew formula listed in the Brewfile, which can all easily be installed by running:
```
brew bundle
```

Usage

Usage: ./build-emacs-for-macos [options] <branch/tag/sha>

Branch, tag, and SHA are from the emacs-mirror/emacs/emacs Github repo,
available here: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs

Options:
    -j, --parallel COUNT             Compile using COUNT parallel processes (detected: 8)
        --git-sha SHA                Override detected git SHA of specified branch allowing builds of old commits
        --[no-]xwidgets              Enable/disable XWidgets (default: enabled)
        --[no-]native-comp           Enable/disable native-comp (default: enabled if supported)
        --[no-]native-fast-boot      Enable/disable NATIVE_FAST_BOOT (default: enabled if native-comp supported)

Resulting applications are saved to the builds directory in a bzip2 compressed tarball.

If you don't want the build process to eat all your CPU cores, pass in a -j value of how many CPU cores you want it to use.

Examples

To download a tarball of the master branch (Emacs 28.x as of writing) and build Emacs.app from it:

./build-emacs-for-macos

To build the stable emacs-27.1 release git tag run:

./build-emacs-for-macos emacs-27.1

All sources as downloaded as tarballs from the emacs-mirror GitHub repository. Hence to get a list of tags/branches available to install, simply check said repository.

Native-Comp

To build a Emacs.app with native-comp support (gccemacs) from the feature/native-comp branch, you will need to install a patched version of Homebrew's gcc formula that includes libgccjit.

The patch itself is in ./Formula/gcc.rb.patch, and comes from this gist.

You can install the patched formula by running the helper script:

./install-patched-gcc

The helper script will copy your local gcc.rb Forumla from Homebrew to ./Formula, and apply the ./Formula/gcc.rb.patch to it. After which it then proceed to install the patched gcc formula which includes libgccjit.

As it requires installing and compiling GCC from source, it can take anywhere between 30-60 minutes or more depending on your machine.

And finally to build a Emacs.app with native compilation enabled, run:

./build-emacs-for-macos feature/native-comp

By default NATIVE_FAST_BOOT is enabled which ensures a fast build by native compiling as few lisp source files as possible to build the app. Any remaining lisp files will be dynamically compiled in the background the first time you use them.

On my machine it takes around 10-15 minutes to build Emacs.app with NATIVE_FAST_BOOT enabled. With it disabled it takes around 25 minutes.

Configuration

Add the following near the top of your early-init.el or init.el:

(setq comp-speed 2)

By default natively compiled *.eln files will be cached in ~/.emacs.d/eln-cache/. If you want to customize that, simply add a new path as the first element to the comp-eln-load-path variable. The path string must end with a /.

Also it seems somewhat common that some *.eln files are left behind with a zero-byte file size if Emacs is quit while async native compilation is in progress. Such empty files causes errors on startup, and needs to be deleted.

Below is an example which stores all compiled *.eln files in cache/eln-cache within your Emacs configuration directory, and also deletes any *.eln files in said directory which have a file size of zero bytes:

(when (boundp 'comp-eln-load-path)
  (let ((eln-cache-dir (expand-file-name "cache/eln-cache/" user-emacs-directory))
        (find-exec (executable-find "find")))
    (add-to-list 'comp-eln-load-path eln-cache-dir)
    ;; Quitting emacs while native compilation in progress can leave zero byte
    ;; sized *.eln files behind. Hence delete such files during startup.
    (when find-exec
      (call-process find-exec nil nil nil eln-cache-dir
                    "-name" "*.eln" "-size" "0" "-delete"))))

Issues

Please see all issues with the native-comp label. It's a good idea if you read through them so you're familiar with the types of issues and or behavior you can expect.

Known Good Commits/Builds

A list of known "good" commits which produce working builds is tracked in: #6 Known good commits of feature/native-comp branch

Credits

I've borrowed some ideas from David Caldwell's excellent build-emacs project, which produces all builds for emacsformacosx.com.
Patches applied are pulled from emacs-plus, which is an excellent Homebrew formula with lots of options not available elsewhere.
The following sources were extremely useful in figuring out how get get the feature/native-comp branch building on macOS:

Internals

The script downloads the source code as a gzipped tar archive from the GitHub mirror repository, as it makes it very easy to get a tarball of any given git reference.

It then runs ./configure with a various options, including copying various dynamic libraries into the application itself. So the built application should in theory run on a macOS install that does not have Homebrew, or does not have the relevant Homebrew formulas installed.

Code quality of the script itself, is well, non-existent. The build script started life a super-quick hack back in 2013, and now it's even more of a dirty hack. I might clean it up and add unit tests if I end up relying on this script for a prolonged period of time. For now I plan to use it at least until native-comp lands in a stable Emacs release for macOS.

License

CC0 1.0 Universal

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