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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Is that true? It increases the load on developers.

Not really, at least until end users are buying ARM machines. But honestly, I think this bit is overplayed. An extreme majority of modern developers writing software that runs on consumer computers are not writing assembly language, and most of them aren’t even writing code in languages that compile AOT to machine code. I’d argue most of the things people use nowadays run in the browser.

Desktop isn’t even the hot new thing anymore, mobile is (or, at least, was.) Ans as fate would have it, mobile platforms are dominated by ARM already. Many modern developers already deal with ARM as it is.

Going further down the rabbit hole, I’d argue that most applications aren’t even nearly CPU bound and would run just fine with emulation, and nobody will bat an eye. This isn’t really theoretical, considering there exists x86 emulation in ARM Windows 10.

And finally, most open source software already runs on many architectures, just look at how many architectures Debian supports.

It does increase load on developers, but not to a degree that would make the benefits to competition unworthy. I think a good amount of developers are capable enough to figure out how to cross compile.

Architectural splits are not new. Apple did it twice already with Mac, and while there’s no evidence of a third one on the horizon yet, it’s certainly not beyond them.

And hell, maybe in the future, developers largely won’t ship architecture-dependent binaries. It is yet to be seen what might happen with WebAssembly and similar technology.

> Not really, at least until end users are buying ARM machines

How do you address the problem caused by the combinatorial explosion of adding a whole new ISA to the OS*distribution combination of platforms that need to be targetted, tested for, and debugged?

It’s been largely solved, for Linux distributions. Many of them have supported a wide array of architectures for a long time.

This is a pretty theoretical problem and wreaks of slippery slope fallacy. How many CPU architectures have even come close to desktop usability in the past 10 years? Even prospect wise I basically only see ARM and RISC-V on the horizon. A combinatoric explosion is unlikely, very unlikely.

I already kind of went over this, but I’ll reiterate:

WebAssembly is a good example of a technology that has the potential to kill two birds with one stone and unify both architectures and OSes. Web browsers are Not the only environment WebAssembly runs in.

Folks writing software in .NET, Python, Java, JS already don’t have to worry about this. They already aren’t dealing with architectures, mostly.

A lot can be done with emulation when performance is not a primary concern. Windows 10 already has x86 emulation for ARM. On Linux Qemu user mode is pretty mature (and is already used for things like setting up ARM chroots on x86 boxes.)

And then you end up requiring a binary-only library, or can't upgrade with the whatever PCI-e device because no drivers and that's the end of the ARM adventure...

Diversity of options is a longer-term tradeoff; it is more expensive in the short term, agreed, but it helps keep the industry from getting stuck in a rut. If you like, it keeps us from getting stuck in local minima, albeit at the cost of not getting to use local minima.

I write software that ports to numerous processors. It's a non-issue. Only issues I've ever seen are casts that break the C spec, and those are ugly anyway. Casts to unaligned boundaries can cause SIGBUS on ARM. Otherwise multiarch is only hard if you are doing SIMD.

If you are working in a higher level language it's a total non-issue. You will not notice.

Porting is not necessarily the issue. As Linus pointed out earlier in the year, platforms that aren't native to the developer generally have issues that fall through the cracks. I recommend you look up the series of posts that CloudFlare did when reviewing the Qualcomm server. There are many obvious optimizations that are just not done because currently all the ARM hardware is targeted at small embedded applications. I have run into many others since I started running benchmarks on the HoneyComb.

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