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?

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    He has a strong opinion, but he hasn’t lost the plot. It’s very reasonable to say you need to develop on the architecture you wanted to deploy to. If you want to be efficient, so most companies are going to deploy to architecture they have locally.

    But you’re taking comments from 2019. Nowadays lots of Mac developers develop directly on arm. So by his own argument, those Mac developers would be more comfortable deploying to an arm-based architecture cuz the running on an arm-based architecture.

    So broadly I agree with him, or his past comments from 2019, you’re going to need local developer environments, before you’re going to get efficient server software

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    As someone dealing with enterprise software for living, what he’s saying absolutely makes sense, and I deal mostly in web applications (where I never really have to worry about the low level stuff).

    Just because the top layer seems to be the same, doesn’t mean the underlying ones are. There’s a reason why perfect bug compatibility is a thing (or maybe, was, in RHEL ecosystem?).

    Things that looks like slam dunks in theories are never such in practice. Weird bugs pop up from time to time; and believe me, they will!

    It might be rare, you may only see it once or twice in a project; but when it happens, you’re gonna want to be ready, or people will question your ability to do your job.

    • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
      1·
      1 year ago

      The cross-compiling point makes sense but, since this is a 4.5 year old message, the state of ARM in the cloud has changed. Now developers do actually have ARM-based machines because of Apple. AWS has Graviton2 instances now and they are a lot cheaper than similarly specced x86_64 instances. ARM is a viable consideration that can be made.

  • kornel@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve got an ARM Mac. I’ve got ARM VPSes from Hetzner, and I’m compiling native code for the server.

    It’s definitely easier to develop, build, and test on the same architecture, than to deal with cross-compilation and emulation.

    So I think Linus is right.

  • Wooki@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    JavaScript and TS are script languages with little to nothing to do with threading

  • phx@lemmy.ca
    1·
    1 year ago

    X86 and AMD64 based stuff is fairly standard in terms of a motherboard with a BIOS/UEFI and peripheral busses. ARM has for a long time been kind of a mess in this regard, and there are several varieties of ARM architecture that don’t play nicely with code compiled for others.

    Don’t get me wrong. ARM can be great for certain types of workloads. It’s typically more efficient at lower power than X86, and better at various types of math. That’s why we DO see it available on ARM for certain stuff like Lambda functions, but you probably won’t be running full VM environments on it.

    Last: notice how it’s been hard to find certain varieties of Pi and various other stuff running ARM? There’s shortages all over the place but I’m general Intel and AMD have been able to apply demand for their CPU’s.

    Yes, devs aren’t tied to hardware, but there are efficiencies of scale to consider

  • umami_wasabi@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    He is sort of right, back in 2019. Even then, IBM PowerPC mainframe are still thriving.

    Now, new language with cross compilation with some maturity are here. Major cloud providers now have ARM base machines ready, even designing to their own need.

    ARM is in the datacenter market and become a trend.

    The only thing I worried about, is the architecture of ARM are too fractured. AWS Graviton might behave differently than Ampere Altra, despite both have the ARM ISA.