Use Mac for memory & processing
This blog describes the author's open-source, cross-platform library in C to talk to an Arduino via serial. The library is available on GitHub. A C project on your Mac can use it to communicate with your Arduino. You'll probably want to create a simple command protocol to keep the two in sync, as serial is pretty "barefoot" by itself, being just a stream of bytes with no markers, packets, or check-sums unless you impose such structures on your data, yourself. It probably doesn't need to be very complex, depending what your application needs.

I have found similar projects in Python and in Java for the Mac/Windows/Linux/&lt;whatever&gt; side; there's plenty of work already done for you.