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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.

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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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