Hacker News Reader

Comment by RobotToaster | Hacker News Reader

Risc-v seems to be rapidly filling in their moat.

Very little software on android is written in assembly, and binary translation seems to be solved anyway.

Arguably, the LLM boom might be the best thing to happen to RISC-V. If software is cheap to produce, it'll be hardware cost that matter more. IE. Companies might say screw the royalty fees, we'll just ask an LLM to convert our software to run on RISC-V.

I think that for 95+% of companies that write software, it's not particularly sensitive to the ISA of the processor it's running on. Anyone who is writing code in a high level language like python or java doesn't care whether they're on x64, ARM or RISC-V. Compilers essentially already do this. There are specific situations (SIMD extensions, cryptography instructions, etc) where the differences sometimes get exposed, but it's pretty rare that this isn't abstracted away.

The truth is always a mix of grey. I hit very weird and difficult to understand bugs because I'm using an ARM mac. That is with projects that declared they were fully compatible with ARM processors. This has told me that changing your ISA is far more complicated than what everyone is saying.

True but who is porting the top 20 languages to risc-v with the same performance

We're starting to see some of this trickle through, but an AI that's really really good at recompiling binaries and remapping system calls and graphics calls is imo possible.

An emulation and platform support dream. Run almost anything anywhere.

It'll probably be a dream

Reply on news.ycombinator.com