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Well all the kids are learning programming with ARM-based RPis so...
Linus very much sounds like a grumpy old man saying "get off of my lawn!" (as he usually does).
Eh, Android's existence is a pretty big counterpoint to that. And you could just run an ARM VM on your desktop if it's that important to you.
>"This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is literally what happened"
right? I mean, I can see arguing that going up into the cloud is different in some ways then going down to smartphones (although the high end ones are now going to outperform plenty of old dev machines in burst power). There are certainly differences in scaling and such. But the maturity of the tech for cross development of high level software isn't the same as it was in that era either. And if we're talking about bottom-to-top revolutions, embedded and smartphones seem to be at a lower level and much higher volume then PCs.
Finally there is clearly an upcoming disruptive fusion event coming due to wearable displays. When "mobile" and "PC" gets merged, it certainly looks like ARM is in a strongly competitive position for some big players, and having more powerful stuff up the stack will matter to them as well.
None of which is to say he won't be right at least in the short term, but it still is kind of odd to not even see it addressed at all, not even a handwave.
I tend to agree that it will suffer. But you can get ARM chromebooks, a bunch of vendors offer ARM-based Windows laptops, and Apple is planning on leveraging their SoC on OS X computers. So it may not necessarily be cross-development for long.
Personally I think ARM could be leapfrogged by RISC-V, though it will take longer than people predict.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And he's wrong. In the enterprise, the vast majority of devs are on Windows, for Java for example. That doesn't mean that their deployment target is Windows, most of the time it's Linux. And the development differences, chance of bugs, performance profiles are way different between OSes than they are between CPU architectures.
I can install a reasonably performing x86 Linux VM on an x86 Windows host. If the same can be said for an ARM VM on an x86 host, please share how, I'd love to learn that trick.
Regarding the VM, today I guess it would be a bit ugly through Qemu but tooling is always solved if there's a need.
I disagree with Linus for a couple of reasons. The main one being that not every service in a product needs to be running ARM for it to be useful. There is nothing preventing heterogenous solutions in the cloud and if third parties vet their code on ARM then deploying your DBMS on ARM and your web server on x86 (or whatever services most of your business logic is in) is totally valid for cost or performance reasons.…
Your second point is just re-enforcing what he said. If MacBooks move ARM, they will have solved developer piece. Since so many developers use Apple stuff, ARM will be native and servers would follow. In the 90s you could see a shift from people having a SPARC workstation in their office for service development, to just using a x86 PC with Linux or Windows on. Then after while developing for Linux/x86 and deploying t…
Well all the kids are learning programming with ARM-based RPis so...
It's of course impossible not to respect Linus' opinion and first hand experience in this space, but doesn't this whole post completely ignore the 100 ton blue whale in the room? Namely smartphones . That's an entire enormous segment of the industry and it's nearly 100% (or entirely 100%?) literally develop-on-x86-deploy-on-ARM. Smartphones also fit > "This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is…
Except that doesn't quite explain why soo many developers use macbooks (OS/X), yet deploy on Linux. Personally I think ARM could be leapfrogged by RISC-V, though it will take longer than people predict.