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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I think most programming languages and associated tools will start supporting ARM64 as a first class citizen. The current lack of support isn't due to apathy, just constraints around ARM64 not being popular for desktop development. For example, it's difficult to support a platform that isn't well supported by your CI/CD provider.

Linus Torvalds previously said that ARM on the server would never be a thing since developers didn't run ARM on their personal machines. Since this assumption is no longer true, the ecosystem of tools will now support ARM better and we'll see ARM on the server become a major thing in a few year's time.

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I don't think that was the case for a long time on the tooling side, OCaml has a great support for ARM64 for a long time now, but Linux ARM64. But well most developers aren't actually using Linux.

But a thing that is going to change is supporting iOS, one of the reasons that this PR was approved(and it adds support to iOS) it's mostly because there is a Mac ARM64

I don't know much about ocaml specifically, but speaking in the abstract, probably one of the best reasons I can think of for a compiler to target arm64 Linux is to target android phones.

Android isn't even on the official list of OS supported, recently I fixed the build system for Android, OCaml is just not a mobile language(yet)

Most OCaml developers might be actually using Linux though.

>But well most developers aren't actually using Linux.

What??

I'm guessing he might have meant OCaml devs? Most development shops I've worked in used Linux servers to host their solution, and mostly Linux/Unix based tools and dev environments (people who preferred Windows as their desktop usually ssh'd to Linux boxes to work).

Most developers, there is a lot of places to get this information but if you look at the stackoverflow survey, which is a survey large enough to be relevant, you get some data around 25% of developers using Linux.

We're talking about as their computer, not servers tho, everyone uses Linux for server

Thanks for the answer! I have a followup question: if the server is Linux, that means the app itself (or the "solution") is Linux based, which means that an OCaml solution would have to compile (or cross-compile to) and run on Linux, which means that ARM64 on Linux is relevant :)

Unless of course most OCaml devs don't target Linux.

Sure it's relevant, but again like Eduardo said, most devs don't have Linux ARM64 dev machines, they don't use it on a daily basis, they don't have experience with it.

53% Use Linux:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

>Linux and Windows are the most common platforms that our respondents say they have done development work for this year. We asked about container technologies like Docker for the first time this year, and Docker was the third most broadly used platform.

But:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

This is the distinction between the platform for which the work is being done and the platform the work is being done on. You can develop for Linux servers from other platforms.

Thanks, peoples from HN would not have understood that, big thumps up!

> everyone uses Linux for server

And here I am deploying .NET and C++ solutions on Windows Servers, strange definition of "everyone".

Chill dude, 'everyone' doesn't mean 'literally everyone on the planet', it's a figure of speech :-)

This is unrelated, but your karma is 2020.

Lol. Not sure if that's a good thing :-D

"Everyone" means most in casual conversation.

You maybe had it confused with the universal quantifier ∀ in a math/logic context, but it's not the same :-)

Which still doesn't apply, when Linux based servers are about 50% of server market.

https://www.t4.ai/industry/server-operating-system-market-sh...

Come on, everyone knows the old trick of using paid shipments to pretend Microsoft have a large share of the server market. It conveniently discounts all these free installations of Linux.

Just like everyone knows those stories about disgruntled employees asking to get their tools back.

I wouldn't think so, from what I've read OCaml has pretty poor windows support.

They at least aren't using Linux on ARM laptops/desktops, which has been a year away for around a decade now.

Well, most aren't. The huge majority of developers use Windows and many use OS X.

In any major dev conference in the US/Europe OS X is almost 50% or more (and almost 80% on the presenters side), while Windows has tons of "silent" users (e.g. not the kind to make noise on blogs/HN/etc, but like 90% of devs anyway, working in enterprise, etc).

Even on Stack Overflow poll, which attracts less of the kind of "silent" enterprise devs more likely to use Windows and "bland" environments like .NET and Java, it's 45% Windows, 27% OS X and a little less of that (26%) Linux.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/stack-overflow-developer-s...

It's funny to see your observations about Stack Overflow, because it was co-founded by an ex Microsoft guy (Spolsky) and I remember in early days there it had quite the .NET community which was probably not coincidental. I think they also run the site on .NET.

They do and very efficiently, it was at one point a bunch of high end servers - they called it out as an example of going deep not broad for scaling.

I remember reading they had 256GB of RAM on DB servers when that seemed like an absurd amount to me.

> But well most developers aren't actually using Linux.

Then it would be Windows and not Mac OS.

Is Mac OS any popular outside USA?

It's certainly popular in the UK. Especially for developers and students. Of course if you're doing mobile (iOS) dev you're pretty much forced to use macs.

I'm not really sure you can call macs "popular" even here in the US.... they're a professional luxury for the most part. I say this with three macs within reach of me.

They seem exceedingly popular in academia, it seems that most university students and professors posses them, even in computer science departments.

The subject of the conversation is developers, who are almost by definition luxurious professionals.

It really depends on the programming culture. Game developers and many enterprise software developers almost universally develop on windows. I’ve had conversations with some people from those areas who have been shocked at the idea software developers use macs - they personally don’t know anyone who does.

But web development shops (especially node/react/etc), consulting, and SV startups seem to pretty consistently use macs.

It’s hard to intuitively tell how popular any of this stuff is in absolute terms because we’re all individually trapped in filter bubbles based on the kind of programmers we interact with.

> Game developers and many enterprise software developers almost universally develop on windows.

Anyone doing mobile game development knows the pain of trying to develop for iOS without using a mac.

>I say this with three macs within reach of me.

Well, they're a steady 10% of the PC market, which would make 1 in 10 computer owners in the US have one. Perhaps more have Macs than any other PC brand (if we break them down individually, e.g. Dell, HP, Asus, Microsoft, etc.).

Any coffeeshop is choke full of Mac laptop yielding people. Any university the same. Most developer conferences (Java, Rails, JS, Python, Golang, etc) is 50%+ Macs on the audience (and close to 80% on the . Stack Overflow poll puts Mac desktop use by devs at 27% (Windows 45%/Linux 26%).

I mean this is fair but I don’t see much point in comparing Apple to a single commodity pc manufacturer, no disrespect intended (I love my xps 13). I suspect coffee shops and universities are simply full of the professional class I implied earlier, which makes sense to me.

Also, go to a community college and count the number of macs there. There’s a clear class bias here.

>Also, go to a community college and count the number of macs there. There’s a clear class bias here.

Sure, since a PC would be more affordable, and in higher performance needs have more bang for the buck.

The Macs are for other kind of niceties (not raw performance per buck) and make different tradeoffs, plus cost more.

Of course it is.

> The current lack of support

I'm not sure that's even true from a tooling perspective. It's true that desktop applications often don't support ARM64, but toolchains usually do because both Android and iOS are primarily ARM64 and are hugely popular platforms.

There's confirmation bias at work here, but I've definitely noticed a slight uptick on ARM-related work to various dev tools (think LLVM and whatnot) in 2019-2020 leading up to the announcement. That and $5 gets you a decent cup of coffee, but hey.

OCaml is known for having a small-ish implementation with good performance IIRC (not sure where multicore is these days). Will have to take a look at this.

OCaml has multicore now and seems to be doing well. Latest report: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-june-2020/6047/1

As someone who jumped on the ARM train early, and someone who doesn't want to contribute to creating more electronic waste than necessary, it's disheartening to see 32-bit ARM being increasingly ignored as a platform compared to ARM64.

ARM 32 bit is supported by OCaml. Just not for iOS/MacOS since the 32 bit iOS devices are ancient by now.

> 32 bit iOS devices are ancient by now

The last iPhone with a 32-bit processor appears to be the iPhone 5c, last produced in 2015. As I type this on a laptop from 2015, I have to question your definition of "ancient".

iPhone 5c uses technology from 2012; it was already terrible to use as it approached its end-of-life in 2017. Old phones just don’t really have the lifespan that computers do. (In contrast, my iPhone SE–which is using 5-year-old technology as well–is still an excellent phone.)

I think that’s increasingly not the case. I’m writing this message on an iPhone 6s which honestly still feels great. I had the battery replaced a couple years ago but aside from that I haven’t had any problems with it - all the apps I run on it feel smooth and responsive. (And in some cases better than my desktop since they aren’t running through electron.)

If not for the camera and iOS support inevitably ending, I don’t see much reason to upgrade.

I think the iPhone 6S is actually the oldest phone to which this applies. It was a big step up in processor speed from the 6, and I think it marked the point at which phone cpus hit "fast enough". Hopefully apple continue to support the 6S for at least a couple more years, because I don't think there's any technical reason why they can't.

Notably it has also 2GB of RAM, when the older devices have 1.

One of the kids' phones is an SE which is pretty much the same internals as the 6S and it's still good.

Ancient, unsupported, and shrinking as older devices are broken or unused and no new device is built. There aren’t many reasons to target 32-bit iPhones, unless it’s a hobby.

32-bit iPhones run iOS 10, so if you have a deployment target set that far back you should support them.

Right, I meant in the context of bringing Open Source tools to 32-bit ARM platforms. I don't think the people holding on to their iPhone 5Cs would bother with OCaml. Of course, if a hacker wants to do it, it's great.

I too am typing it from a 2015 computer.

The definition of "ancient" is probably not the same for your laptop and for a planned-obsolescence apple mobile device

It's not just ARM; the same has been happening to x86. 32-bit in general is going out of fashion for general-purpose platforms.

I keep a 32-bit x86 Mac alive as a hobby project, and I've noticed the same thing. Debian seems to be the only Linux distribution with a maintained and up-to-date x86 port.

edit: I don't want to take up more space in this thread, but would like to thank Vogtinator and saagarjha for pointing out other options for 32-bit Linux distributions.

Alpine Linux supports it.

openSUSE Tumbleweed supports i586 and up.

Tumbleweed is just great!!! That comes from a Arch and FreeBSD veteran.

Well, even many mid-tier phones already have 4 GB RAM now.

The demise of 32-bit was/is inevitable for personal computing.

It's not just about electronic waste, many low power embedded platforms are still ARM 32 bit.

I have this vague idea, which can be completely false, that porting software that runs on ARM64 Linux (which is what cloud servers use) to Mac ARM64 (which I think is BSD derived?) is not trivial. Or is it?

Depends on the kind of software. POSIX compatible C requires few, if any, source changes. Code that makes direct syscalls will need more work.

It's worth pointing out that MacPorts still has a lot of modern tools and utilities working for PowerPC Macs. This is despite PowerPC Macs being 'officially' stuck on GCC 4.2 (unless you install newer... through MacPorts), ancient Mac OS X frameworks and barely any developers have a PowerPC machine at hand (because why would they).

MacPorts also mostly supports Apple silicon. It's pretty cool!

In the general case it's not necessarily trivial, just like porting software from x86 linux to x86 mac is not necessarily trivial. For example your software might rely on some system interface that's done differently on those platforms, e.g. if you're using kprobes then it would take an effort to port that to use dtrace. And if we're talking about a GUI application then the framework it uses might not be first-class on mac, e.g. GTK only works in an X11-based way. But there are cases where it's as simple as pushing the compile button and getting out something working.

Hah, and arm servers were already gaining an economic edge before Apple’s consumer product switch.

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