Linus Torvalds Comments on ARM: Did he lose touch with reality? - eviltoast

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?

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    To be incredibly blunt, and I don’t say this to be rude, your questions and assertions are incredibly ignorant. Linus isn’t talking about JS developers at all. Even a little bit. I promise you, you would not enjoy hearing his unfiltered thoughts on JS developers.

    Are you drunk? The guy literally speaks about cross-platform and higher level stuff, let me quote him for you:

    This is true even if what you mostly do is something ostensibly cross-platform like just run perl scripts or whatever. Simply because you’ll want to have as similar an environment as possible,

    lol

    • Windex007@lemmy.world
      11·
      1 year ago

      In this case the reason that you see the rest of the pack in your rear view mirror isn’t because you’re in the lead: it’s because you’re getting lapped.

      I strongly encourage you to reach out to Linus directly to inform him of your insights. Please post back with the results.