Rosetta is an old acquaintance of the developers. Moving from Power PC to Intel processors, Rosetta helped with that transition. Applications written for Power PC were automatically ported to new Intel-based Macs on the fly. Users didn't have to wait for developers to release new Intel-compatible versions of their applications. With Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs, Apple gives you the same advantage. It will also help developers by giving them a comfort zone in migrating and testing their native applications.
Until developers recompile and release their applications for Apple Silicon Macs, you won't be without your important software. Even you can run your iPhone and iPad apps with Rosetta 2. Craig Federighi, vice president of software engineering, reminded us that Apple has been down this path before. Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon Macs offers fast performance and translates your applications at installation time. That means they will be released immediately and will be very responsive. The software tool also supports translation on the fly for Just-In-Time (JIT) applications such as web browser or Java applications.
During WWDC we were shown a demonstration video where Andreas Wendker, Apple's vice president of tooling and framework engineering, demonstrated running Maya 3D modeling and animation software in a virtual machine. It looked very good. Fluid and powerful, smooth and with incredible potential. Playing at Shadow of the Tomb Raider using a game controller, played perfect
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Along with Rosetta 2, macOS Big Sur lets you enjoy incredible virtualization support. You won't need something like Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox. At least in theory because in the video, Andreas Explicitly Used Parallels To Run Linux In Big Sur At Apple Silicon.
We will see how Apple Silicon and Rosetta 2 evolve and the potential it may have. But, of course, things look very good.