Arm64 Visual Studio – Visual Studio Blog
devblogs.microsoft.com
devblogs.microsoft.com
WTF? Unacceptable and probably just a bug in the installer?
The installer is a separate binary and currently still requires Rosetta. There's an update due out very soon (a few weeks) that will remove the Rosetta requirement. The team prioritized getting the application fully native before the installer since you spend a lot more time running the app than the installer.
Also it's important to know that Visual Studio for Mac isn't the exact same application as Visual Studio (Windows). Visual Studio is 25 years old and has some Windows specific features that don't make sense on macOS. Also, Visual Studio for Mac is optimized to integrate with macOS features (e.g. accessibility and themeing). There's a lot of code shared between the editor, project system, debuggers, etc., and we try to balance making them as similar as possible while following the macOS app guidelines and conventions.
Disclaimer: I'm on the .NET team at Microsoft, and work with the Visual Studio for Mac team a lot.
Microsoft's been here before. A lot of 32-bit applications for Windows 9x used 16-bit installers! It was so common that I think 64-bit Windows actually had a hack to swap out the executable part of common old installers so those 32-bit apps would still install.