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Comment by seabass-labrax | Hacker News Reader

I was only just today looking for low-power x86 machines to run FreePBX, which does not yet have an ARM64 port. Whilst the consumer computing space is now perfectly served by ARM and will soon be joined by RISC-V, if a widely-used piece of free and open source server software is still x86-only, you can bet that there are thousands of bespoke business solutions that are locked to the ISA. A monopoly would hasten migration away from these programs, but would nonetheless be a lucrative situation for Intel-AMD in the meantime.

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The fact that C++ development has been effectively hijacked by the "no ABI breakage, ever"/backwards compatibility at all costs crowd certainly speaks to this.

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/

There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose source code is long gone, and these are effectively locked to x86_64 chips until the cost of interoperability becomes greater than reverse engineering their non-trivial functionality.

C++ language spec doesn't specify and doesn't care about ABI (infamously so; it's kept the language from being used in many places, and where people ignored ABI compat initially but absolutely needed it in the future, as with BeOS's Application Kit and Mac kexts, it's much harder to maintain than it should be.

"two factions" is only discussing source compatibility.

They had ABI breakage when C++11 support was implemented in GCC 5 and that was extremely painful. Honestly, I still wish that they had avoided it.

You can still use the old ABI with -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0

Microsoft (and other parties) already demonstrated quite effective x86 emulation, opening the migration path away from this anachronistic ISA.

Surely there must be an emulator you could use?

Indeed, I could use QEMU to run FreePBX on ARM64. However, the performance penalty would be pretty severe, and there isn't anything inherent to FreePBX that should prevent it from running natively on ARM64. It simply appears that nobody has yet spent the time to iron out any problems and make an official build for the architecture, but unfortunately I think there is still loads of other software in a similar situation.

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