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Comment by dblooman | Hacker News Reader

Having tried Windows on ARM with the surface, I was surprised that many apps I use every day were not available. Perhaps Apple will be better at onboarding developers to the transition, but will also be interesting to see how long developers continue to support Intel. Can anyone speak as to the difficulty of working with ARM and Windows?

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> I was surprised that many apps I use every day were not available

Why's it surprising? I wouldn't even know where to get an ARM workstation to test my software on.

They announced the move to Intel in 2005 and dropped PowerPC support in 2009, so I'm guessing about the same period for the ARM transition.

Unless they pull a rabbit out of hat, they will not have a x86-64 emulator this time (for the same reasons why intel is struggling with speed/power efficiency ratio for years now) so it won't be that easy. It will be either ARM of Intel hardware and people will have to choose.

Oh I'm sure they'll have one. It'll just be slow.

> Unless they pull a rabbit out of hat, they will not have a x86-64 emulator this time (for the same reasons why intel is struggling with speed/power efficiency ratio for years now)

I don't understand what you mean - you absolutely can emulate AArch64 in AMD64. You can emulate any instruction set in any other instruction set.

They're saying it won't be fast or power-efficient.

> They announced the move to Intel in 2005 and dropped PowerPC support in 2009, so I'm guessing about the same period for the ARM transition.

Zero chance. It's quite likely they don't even have a roadmap for how they'd develop silicon for the higher end chip sector at this point in ARM, never mind getting it done and moving software support in four years.

If this happens it will take fifteen years, and I think Apple may well abandon the entire endeavour (or MacOS) before then.

Pro-tip: Multilib. Adding a cheap binary translation VM for non-native apps running in a multi-lib fashion should be no big effort.

So you push the emulation boundary up as high as possible, rather than at the syscall interface? Good idea!

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