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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: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday February 25 2019, @05:36PM (4 children)
Yes, but for *me* and *my application* Java is a non-starter. I wish this wasn't true, as I'd prefer choices besides Python and Ruby. All the Java serialization approaches concentrate on portability at the expense of compact data. Whoops!
Actually, C++ and D, and even go, would be reasonable choices, but Python's a lot faster to develop in. Java would be nearly as fast if it didn't discriminate so against 64 bit integers and utf8 (or even if it just handled utf32 well). Vala looks good, but it's too tied to the Gnome system. Objective-C has all their documentation specific to the Mac. So it's going to be Python, with a goal of eventually translating the code into C++ or D. (FWIW, the main problem is lists "arbitrarily" embedded into lists as the data structure. LISP would be the reasonable approach, but it seems essentially a dead language, and one can point to lots of reasons why. Clojure inherites problems from Java, and also has data all being immutable, instead of only externally visible data being immutable. Erlang would require all the mutable data to be stored in a hash table or database. Etc. Then there are the problems with available documentation systems. Fortunately DOxygen will work with Python, as Sphinx is terrible, and when they converted epydoc into PyDoc they made it so garish as to be unreadable. (It also generates truly horrible html. For one example just look at the white-space handling.)
I should also consider Fortran, but I haven't found any good text on modern Fortran, specifically including focus on concurrency. I've got a couple of bad ones. And I did consider Ada...but though it's got a few good features that don't exist in any other language I've seen, it's got so many bad features that I dropped it. (Look into writing a binary file with a header record different from the rest of the contents. It actually *is* doable, but what a pain! And to call the way of documenting your code terrible is to over-praise it dramatically.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 25 2019, @06:00PM
Wow. As you point out, there are LOTS of choices. All with pros and cons. If there were one perfect choice everyone would use it. I picked Java long ago because it seemed, and has been a very good fit building big code base web applications. Particularly refactoring tools in modern IDEs.
I still like Lisp even though, as you say, it is a dead language. Yet there is so much you learn by using it. I guess like Latin. :-) And there are a lot of fun things you can do in Lisp and related languages. Just for pure fun.
I don't know what you're trying to do, so I don't know specifically why Java is unsuitable, but it sounds like you've really understood your particular problems and workable choices.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday February 27 2019, @11:52AM (2 children)
Since I'm a Clojure fan, I'll point out that Clojure uses immutability by default but has ways you can work with mutable data. But I suspect it still doesn't fit - if Java won't work, it would be weird if an alternative built on top of Java would work. Though if I recall correctly, Clojure syntax makes handling of 64 bit uints or equivalent easier than Java. With Java the BigInteger syntax gets clunky in a hurry. Clojurescript could also be an option if you go that route, I suppose.
If you're doing something involving number-crunching, reddit programming seems to have a lot of fans of the Julia and Nim languages. I haven't used either, though.
Good luck no matter how you go.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 27 2019, @05:38PM (1 child)
Julia won't work, but I do keep looking at Nim. I'm just not sure how seriously to take it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 27 2019, @05:57PM
So. I just looked again. Many of the documentation links are stale. (You need to recode them from the git page to the org page. Easy enough translation, but they move the site without updating the links.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.