Linus Torvalds Comments on ARM: Did he lose touch with reality?
Linus Torvalds Comments on ARM: Did he lose touch with reality?
tr:dr; he says "x86 took over the server market" because it was the same architecture developers in companies had on their machines thus it made it very easy to develop applications on their machines to then ship to the servers.
Now this, among others he made, are very good points on how and why it is hard for ARM to get mainstream on the datacenter, however I also feel like he kind lost touch with reality on this one...
He's comparing two very different situations, more specifically eras. Developers aren't so tied anymore like they used to be to the underlaying hardware. The software development market evolved from C to very high language languages such as Javascript/Typescript and the majority of stuff developed is done or will be done in those languages thus the CPU architecture becomes irrelevant.
Obviously very big companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are more than happy to pay the little "tax" to ensure Javascript runs fine on ARM than to pay the big bucks they pay for x86..
What are your thoughts?
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It's tough to debug issues when you can't run on the same hardware directly.
There's a reason that arm support in open source software has exploded in the past few years, and it's because of apple silicon.
I'll agree that it's easier now, with most developers using higher level runtimes, but someone's got to get those runtimes working, and it's much easier to develop if you have a laptop running that hardware.
Raspberry Pi also brought arm64 to a lot more people.