I was trying out Udacity's React Nanodegree and found out (the hard way) that there are some things that Apple M1 users may run into.

In short, there is this error you'll keep running into when you try to run npm start:

FATAL ERROR: wasm code commit Allocation failed - process out of memory

First thing: make sure Node is updated on your machine. You can check that by simply running node in Terminal. Make sure it's higher than version 12.

Next, cd into your project folder, and then run

nvm install node

This will ensure you have the latest version of Node specifically for your project, especially if you git clone'd the project straight from the linked Udacity repo.

If all goes to plan, npm start should compile successfully!

Let me know in the comments if this worked (or not) for you!