Reference / Compatibility

Platform Support

Deployment floors, simulator limits, and the toolchain Raster verifies.

Raster supports iOS, macOS, tvOS, and Mac Catalyst through Swift Package Manager. The package manifest sets the floors. Raster 2.0 keeps that baseline unless a platform API forces an explicit change.

Platform	Compatibility baseline	Normal validation
iOS	11.0	Generic device build and a current iOS Simulator test run.
macOS	10.13	SwiftPM build/test and example application build.
tvOS	13.0	Generic device build and simulator tests when a runtime is installed.
Mac Catalyst	iOS 13-era Catalyst toolchain	Xcode test build against the package scheme.

The floor is the OS version where Raster's public APIs are availability-guarded. A given device can still miss a Metal feature or a built-in filter.

Device capabilities

MTIContext records the device capabilities Raster already asked about:

isMetalPerformanceShadersSupported
isYCbCrPixelFormatSupported
isMemorylessTextureSupported
isProgrammableBlendingSupported
defaultLibrarySupportsProgrammableBlending

Optional processing paths should consult these flags. Built-in filters fall back when they can, or they fail with a framework error if the subsystem they need is missing.

Raster runs in Simulator. Capability still depends on the host hardware, Xcode, and the installed runtime. The MetalPetal 1.26 capstone was validated with Xcode 26.3 on Apple silicon, including MPS-backed CLAHE tests in iOS Simulator. That Simulator result does not replace a device run for features that depend on pixel formats, memoryless textures, programmable blending, camera buffers, or encoder integration. Simulator is a good place for correctness and API coverage. Performance numbers that need to reflect a device should be measured on a device.

Toolchains

Raster CI pins the primary Xcode version so the same compiler shows up again next week, and it keeps one current-runner smoke job so upcoming breakage shows up before a release. A toolchain is supported after the package tests, consumer fixtures, examples, and platform builds pass together. Objective-C modules, Metal includes, generated source, and platform SDKs can fail independently, so a single Swift compile is a thin signal.

For the matrix, see Tests & CI.