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?
“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.”
I saw someone else make a similar comment about C. People track these things, and C has been in the top 2 most widely used languages for more than 2 decades. Not knowing this should probably make you wonder why your background has resulted in such a narrow experience.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIOBE_index#
Look, I’m not saying C is important nor that people aren’t using it but… Let me ask you one thing, if you look at the majority of the web (not specific cases) you’ll find that 76% of it is PHP. Furthermore if you think that everyone is moving to mobile apps you’ll get a mix of Java/Kotlin, Swift and a very strong move to towards cross-platform stuff that is, in most cases, based on Javascript. To make things worse bootcamps for wanna be devs have been teaching node as a valid backend solution for quite a while now. We see startups going that route and things going perfectly well.
Since we’ve that huge market for higher level that run perfectly well on ARM do you really thing that stuff made in C really dictates the future of the market? The “issue” I see with the link you’ve provided is simple: nobody is developing “run of the mill” solutions with C anymore like we used to and those are the solutions that have the numbers to move the market. Nowadays C is operating systems, libraries for higher level languages, engines such as the JS V8, a ton of IoT devices (that ironically are ARM), low level electronics, industrial automation and financial use cases where performance is really important.
C is going to stay on specific places but nobody develops websites, desktop and mobile applications with hence my simplistic “the software development market evolved from C to very high language languages such as Javascript/Typescript” conclusion.
The market is moved by the large masses and the masses use technologies that are not bound anymore to architectures like other used to be.
It’s odd that you’re saying you shouldn’t consider the specific cases where C excels and then narrowing down things to the Web, where languages like php excel. So now you probably have some idea why your experience is so narrow. There’s a lot more to programming than the Web, and there’s always going to be.