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Comment by AlexeyBrin | Hacker News Reader

A Linux distro probably, at least initially.

Does Huawei sell Linux laptops today? Why not? Why would that change? If they don't think x86/Linux or ARM/Linux laptops are a good idea, why would RISC-V/Linux laptops be a good idea?

People love to come up with fantasies and try to work backwards from them, but sometimes you really can't get there from here.

They sell windows intel laptops, pretty good ones, but now they’ve been shut out of that market, so they may very well make RISC laptops with Linux or some proprietary OS.

Is there a Windows version for RISC-V? Can they still legally use it? Do they want to dependent on Microsoft? I think these are questions that need an answer and I doubt that they are all answered affirmatively.

If Huawei adopts RISC-V then they drive RISC-V adoption to some indeterminate extent. When the market is sufficiently large, someone might consider RISC-V laptops to be a good idea. Even if it's "only" a company like Pine64.

You have a surplus of condescension and a lack of imagination.

> If they don't think x86/Linux or ARM/Linux laptops are a good idea

They didn't until now, but the US government just told them commercial OSes with a connection to the US can not be trusted, so they might very well be rethinking that.

Mostly likely, but Android is but a recompile away (sure, not so for 3rd party apps).

Even today, with hardly any hardware, there's (to various degree of completion): Debian, Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, and seL4.

> sure, not so for 3rd party apps.

Ideally, once there is a JVM that runs on riscv, those apps are ported for free. An openJDK port is underway.

I have no idea how much work it would be for Android to port its APIs, but Google certainly has the manpower if this is something they want.

I don't know why there would be _any_ porting involved. Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it.

The major pain points today are the JITs, which applies to Java and JavaScript in particular. There has been preciously little (public) progress on these.

> Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it.

But the compiler (openjdk in this case) still needs to be ported, no?

EDIT: I think we are talking about two different things. The Java compiler (which emits Java bytecode) should be ported for convenience but that is not necessary. The compiler which compiles the actual JVM into an executable doesn't need to be ported, but it does need to have support added for emitting riscv machine code.

Huawei wrote their own AOT compiler[1] for Android (on ARM) so they seem to have the necessary expertise in this area.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/3022747/heres-w...

It's a lot of work, and I don't know that there's any support for the effort to port V8 and ART to RISC-V. When I was starting on V8 port, I didn't see much in terms of interest in providing material support for it.

I got one interview out of it, but I feel like maybe the Foundation is the right place for that. They'd have to delegate the hiring and management to a member, but I think it could work.

Huawei has their own VM for Android, so they would likely port that for their effort.

Absolutely, giants like Google or Huawei could pull this off, I really don't know if we'll see Java without someone like that. Personally I'm keen to see Mozilla's JavaScript VM (is it still called SpikerMonkey?) ported, but I doubt it will happen until we see more widely available/affordable RISC-V hardware.

I just don't have any interest in running any software that uses mozilla's JavaScript runtime. It has a lot going for it but I just find Mozilla based browsers misbehave and perform poorly on all my hardware, in ways that upset and frustrate me.

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