Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space • Hacker News Board

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#331

Post by MBCook » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #200

flohofwoe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smartphones are a good argument for both views IMHO. Native development (as in native machine code executables) on Android is still a terrible experience even though they had a decade to fix it. It's much better on Apple platforms, maybe because they actually cared about developer-experience and native code is a "first class citizen" there. It goes beyond the different instruction set of course and most of the time t…

What do you think can be improved in Android? Unlike iOS, Android is actually running in diverse hardware. All iOS devices are Arm, where as Android will run on x86. That alone makes it more of a hassle.

Is it? I was under the impression x86 had basically failed and everything was ARM. Or is MIPS or something else reasonably popular?

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#332

Post by avodonosov » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

People developing on tablets (it's real, quote [0]: "Since 2015 I do most of my software development on an Android tablet. I am a bit fed up with PCs and notebooks, as they are tedious to handle and have too many mechanical parts. A tablet is more convenient, it can be held in one hand, and usually survives if coffee is spilt over it."), have ARM as their development environment, so if the Linus' argument is true, ARM has chances.

0 - https://picolisp.com/wiki/?TermuxPentiPicoLisp

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#333

Post by blinkingled » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

He didn't even discuss the every ARM board being a snow flake needing its own BSP, custom bootloader, OS distro etc.

I am fine with x86 being successful - there are good reasons for it. I don't get why there's this ARM push in the PC and servers market. It's not making anything better.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#334

Post by kstrauser » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

supermatt wrote: post #316

admax88q wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well nobody uses NetBSD so... Sure portability increases code quality, but at what cost to time to market which seems to be the primary concern for most developers these days?

NetBSD (and NetBSD code) is used pretty much everywhere. The internet pretty much runs on it.

That might be a bit oversold. I love the BSDs, but I'd think by now that Linux in all its forms would surely heavily outweigh NetBSD by now.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#335

Post by sriram_sun » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #301

Androider wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Node and Ruby applications do fail on ARM though, when it comes to native libraries and extensions. And now your whole distro is different than your development machine, which adds complexity. Do 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 pessimistic…

I'm suffering through this now -- I have a custom C++ Node exception that needs to run on both x64 and ARM. The ARM cpu is onboard a mobile robot, where I care about power draw. The good news is that Clang can cross-compile fairly easily. Much better than gcc. The bad news is that there are a surprising number of missing libraries on Ubuntu/ARM64. For example, Eigen3. And although the code is fairly compatible, there…

How about using CMake to download and cross-compile the 3rd party dependencies? I've worked on a couple of robotics applications (C++). I wouldn't depend on Ubuntu for packages. You'll lose the flexibility to choose package versions, apply patches etc.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#336

Post by nfriedly » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

I just read something this morning that Apple is looking at switching Macs to ARM. So, if that happens, an ARM server will match what at least some developers are using.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#337

Post by MBCook » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

mattnewport wrote: post #195

pjc50 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple replace Intel with ARM in their laptops, that goes away too. (See my argument elsewhere in this thread)

Apple is a small percentage of the laptop market.

But their market share with developers is much higher than in the general consumer market.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#338

Post by stickfigure » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

admax88q wrote: post #309

pcwalton wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think I'll side with Linus on this one. I saw first-hand how non-existent the x86 Android market was, despite Intel pouring megabucks into the project. Doesn't that refute Linus' argument, not strengthen it? Almost all Android developers develop on x86. Intel thought, as Linus apparently does, that this would drive adoption of x86 on phones. It didn't. Intel even got competitive in power efficiency and it wasn't…

Phones are different than servers though. The primary customer of a phone is Joe Somebody who doesn't know or care about architectures, only battery life and cost. Well ARM wins there. The primary customer of servers is developers who care less about cost and more about time to market.

I'm a developer deploying code to JVMs running in a PaaS (Google App Engine). I don't know or care what the architecture is.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#339

Post by nicoburns » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #314

Androider wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, if Apple does switch to ARM chips for their laptops, that will make mainstream ARM server-side development more viable than any cross-platform story ever can. Or kill the Mac desktop. One or the other :)

I don’t think that it would kill desktop, but I’m sure that unless ARM will be much faster, developers will use x86 macs for a long time.

Apple's latest iPad processors are competitive with low-end laptop x86 processors. And they have a much stricter power budget than a laptop. If Apple wants to go this route, then they probably have the capability to build the chips to support it.

Re: Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space

#340

Post by pcwalton » Fri, Feb 22, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

Androider wrote: post #328

pcwalton wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When developing for iOS you typically interact with the iOS simulator on your desktop, which natively compiles your app against x86 versions of the mobile frameworks. And the fact that the "develop on x86, test on ARM" workflow works so smoothly on iOS is strong evidence that Linus is wrong.

Who's going to make the "develop on x86, deploy on server-side ARM" experience smooth? It certainly isn't today. Who has that kind of control of the entire stack top to bottom? Amazon is the only one that comes to mind... but I wouldn't bet on it.

I think it's a smooth enough experience, yours notwithstanding. It's just that there aren't many server-side ARM options available, so we don't have much experience.