Hacker News Reader

LLVM bitcode is not that portable in reality. Just like Plan9 assembly intermediary bitcode files are pretty much single architecture, due to containing lots and lots of low-level assumptions about the target architecture, not to mention possible incompatibilities in extended intrinsics (for example for vector units).

View on HN

Most of the portability problems for retargetting to another little endian 64-bit architecture aren't the easy ones of bit widths and integer types, but rather more subtle things like a more relaxed memory model and different performance characteristics.

It's not worth the overhead of attempting to ship bitcode. Apple has shipped products on 6502, 68000, PPC, x86, x86-64, ARM, and ARM64. The transitions have been annoying for the lost software, but that's not an unusual occurrence for an OSX upgrade either.

What was the Newton using ?

They were also ARM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com