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Comment by EduardoRFS | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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)

> 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.

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