SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=183440&curpostid=183486
Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market?
It wasn't just all price. It was literally this "develop at home" issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a "real server". And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.
Do you really not understand? This isn't rocket science. This isn't some made up story. This is literally what happened, and what killed all the RISC vendors, and made x86 be the undisputed king of the hill of servers, to the point where everybody else is just a rounding error. Something that sounded entirely fictional a couple of decades ago.
Without a development platform, ARM in the server space is never going to make it. Trying to sell a 64-bit "hyperscaling" model is idiotic, when you don't have customers and you don't have workloads because you never sold the small cheap box that got the whole market started in the first place.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Channeling the late Steve Jobs, Linux kernel king Linus Torvalds this week dismissed cross-platform efforts to support his contention that Arm-compatible processors will never dominate the server market.
Responding to interest in Arm's announcement of its data center-oriented Neoverse N1 and E1 CPU cores on Wednesday, and a jibe about his affinity for native x86 development, Torvalds abandoned his commitment to civil discourse and did his best to dampen enthusiasm for a world of heterogeneous hardware harmony.
"Some people think that 'the cloud' means that the instruction set doesn't matter," Torvalds said in a forum post. "Develop at home, deploy in the cloud. That's bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you're going to want to deploy on x86, because you'll be able to run what you test 'at home' (and by 'at home' I don't mean literally in your home, but in your work environment)."
For Torvalds, this supposedly unavoidable preference for hardware architecture homogeneity means technical types will gladly pay more for x86 cloud hosting, if only for the assurance that software tested in a local environment performs the same way in the data center.
Jobs during his time as Apple's CEO took a similar stance toward native application development, going so far as to ban Adobe's Flash technology on devices running iOS in 2010. For Jobs, cross-platform code represented a competitive threat, bugs, and settling for lowest-common denominator apps.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Monday February 25 2019, @03:47PM (3 children)
Because no true Scotsman develops in anything higher-level than C. Nobody uses C# or Java (which compile to bytecode) or (heaven forfend) scripting languages like Py***n or J***S***pt (let us not utter their names here) and no hosting company makes their money off of racks of servers serving Wordpress sites (ugh, even I threw up in my mouth a little bit then...) Nope, only people creating lovingly hand-crafted C (not even that modern C++ rubbish) that caresses the bare metal of the processor do "development" (not that we don't need those people - we just don't need many).
Not an issue with ARM which can work in either big- or little- endian mode. Likewise, its 2019 and realistically with Intel vs. ARM servers we're talking about 64-bit platforms. (If we're looking back to the rise of the x86 server then Windows wasn't even clean 32-bit and things like near- and far- pointers were still a thing). Details of byte alignment, data type sizes will likely be dictated by the OS or compiler toolchain/standard library - or whatever standard data formats you are working to - rather than the hardware platform.
In any case, since even hardware platforms change over time (e.g. we're just coming to the end of the 32-to-64 bit transition with x86) making your code as processor-agnostic as possible is a Good Thing in itself. Some developers (e.g. OS kernel and driver writers) have a genuine need to write 'close to the metal' but they are a minority of "developers" as a whole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @04:25PM (2 children)
The Linux kernel has been rewritten in JavaScript? Who knew?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday February 25 2019, @05:43PM (1 child)
I don't know if it was the kernel, but I'm rather sure I read of a Javascript implementation of Linux that ran in a browser. It probably just handed all the calls off to the system, but I wasn't interested enough to check.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 25 2019, @09:10PM
IIRC, it was booting a linux image on a JS X86 emulator by Fabrice Bellard of qemu, ffmpeg & tinycc fame.