Perhaps Apple ARM laptops will help with marketing ARM as a viable option, but we already develop on OS X in order to deploy to Linux without any great calling for OS X servers.Ĭloud server “hardware” has also drifted from what you see in real hardware. My feeling is it will be net zero as far as ARM servers are concerned until the hardware is made and is viable. How many developers use their laptops as a dumb SSH terminal? While some C extensions to scripting languages will need some love, the majority of major interpreted or VM driven languages work already. Certainly some developers will need to be on an Intel chip, but not all. With a switch to ARM, you may gain a little in term of autonomy, but with macbook pro already at +8 hours (~a work day), not sure it's a game changer, at best you will stay the same in term of performance, and you will lose in compatibility with other OSes. The switch from ppc to intel was annoying for a lot of Apple users at the time, but there were a lot of goodies (bootcamp, better autonomy, better performance, VMs) that kind of made it up for it, basically, nothing was lost in term of possibilities, a few were actually gained, and only the transition was a bit painful. In the end, with the Linux subsystem in Windows, choosing Windows as a development platform might make more sense.Īs a side note, if Apple switches to ARM, I foresee a lot of cringing. If Apple release its own solution or creates a partnership with let's say VMWare to release something at the same time an ARM macbook comes out, it might work, but barely, and I'm not sure if developers are at the top of Apple's priority list. But it would also require a good desktop virtualization solution for ARM. It might be conceivable to use the ARM port of, or the ARM version of Windows 10. Most developers using macbooks I know have VMs for either Windows or Linux works. Unless you are deeply disconnected from the hardware, CPU architecture does matter. It will most likely kill apple laptops as a developer platform. Even if it's as simple as checking a box during upload that "yes, this game can run on X86", a huge chunk of the developers will simply never do that. If the developers don't run the same platform, it's not going to happen, no matter how great the cross platform story is in theory. I saw first-hand how non-existent the x86 Android market was, despite Intel pouring megabucks into the project. I think I'll side with Linus on this one. And now your whole distro is different than your development machine, which adds complexity.ĭo I really want to be debugging why node-gyp fails to compile scrypt on the ARM distro on the new Amazon A1 ARM instance (which it did in my case)? And if I solve that, what about the other 2451 dependencies? Let's pessimistically say there's a 1% failure rate, I'll be stuck doing that forever! Nah, I'll just go back to my comfy x86 instance, life's short and there's much code to write :) Node and Ruby applications do fail on ARM though, when it comes to native libraries and extensions.
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