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I think for a site full of developers, the almost exclusively welcome reactions to such a change are intriguing.

Don't you worry you will have to cross-compile to run your programs on the amd64 server? Or how you are going to debug locally bugs that may arise from a different architecture? Or that homebrew could be in an inconsistent state for some years until all software catches up with the new architecture?

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Apple dealt with this last time with Universal Binaries https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_binary

Recompiling software isn’t as scarey as some people seem to think as long as you have a decent toolchain. And, in my experience toolchains have improved a lot in the last few decades. Automated build processes are de rigueur these days.

Actual hardware to test on is essential for debugging, but it’s not like ARM based Unix/Linux isn’t already a thing.

Assuming Apple doesn’t lock down the OS, I’d say that open source ports like Homebrew will be available almost immediately. It’s the closed source vendors with outdated development processes that might drag their heels.

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