> Users and businesses are entrenched
What dependency do you think most users and business have on the instruction set architecture, even if you ignore that you can translate?
What dependency do you think most users and business have on the instruction set architecture, even if you ignore that you can translate?
Consumers probably less so but businesses will definitely care. Translation might be an option for some. However, Rosetta currently only supports limited translation [0].
[0] - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
Written in assembly language?
Finding the source isn't free. Finding the archived compiler isn't free. Finding a machine that still can run the compiler isn't free. Re-writing the app isn't free.
A lot of the low-level stuff in standard libraries, third-party libraries and in our own code rely on platform details like calling conventions, which will almost certainly be different for a different architecture. Sure it can probably be rewritten, and a lot of code in the standard library already has generic high-level variants as fallback, but it's not going to be a simple recompile for us.
By extension then, our customers rely on the ISA as long as they rely on our application, and our software is key to their operation.