Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on February 21, 2019 8:03 am wrote:
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on February 21, 2019 12:53 am wrote:
> >
> > Linus is the ultimate unixoid. I paid attention that even
> > less devoted unixoids are high on native development.
> > For me, as one that drinks and breaths cross-development all his professional
> > life, it sounds strange, but this mindset is not rare at all.
>
> I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does
> cross-development, the platform won't be all that stable.
>
> Or successful.
>
> Some people think that "the cloud" means that the instruction
> set doesn't matter. 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).
>
> Which means that you'll happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches
> what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better.
>
> 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,
>
> Which in turn means that cloud providers will end up making more money from their x86 side, which
> means that they'll prioritize it, and any ARM offerings will be secondary and probably relegated
> to the mindless dregs (maybe front-end, maybe just static html, that kind of stuff).
>
> 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.
>
> The price advantage of ARM will never be there for ARM servers unless you get enough volume to make
> up for the absolutely huge advantage in server volume that Intel has right now. Being a smaller die
> with cheaper NRE doesn't matter one whit, when you can't make up for the development costs in volume.
> Look at every ARM server offering so far: they were not only slower, they were more expensive!
>
> And the power advantage is still largely theoretical and doesn't show very much on
> a system level anyway, and is also entirely irrelevant if people end up willing to
> pay more for an x86 box simply because it's what they developed their load on.
>
> Which leaves absolutely no real advantage to ARM.
>
> This is basic economics.
>
> And the only way that changes is if you end up saying "look, you can deploy more cheaply
> on an ARM box, and here's the development box you can do your work on".
>
> Actual hardware for developers is hugely important. I seriously claim
> that this is why the PC took over, and why everything else died.
>
> So you can pooh-pooh it all you want, and say "just cross-build", but as long as you do that, you're going
> to be a tiny minority, and you don't see the big picture, and you're ignoring actual real history.
>
> And btw, calling this an "unixoid" mindset is just showing what a total disconnect to reality
> you have, and how stupid your argument is. Unix lost. Yes, it lives on in the shape of Linux,
> but Unix lost not just to Linux, but to Windows. In fact, arguably it lost to windows first.
>
> Why? Same exact reason, just on the software side. In both cases. Where did you find developers?
> You found them on Windows and on Linux, because that's what developers had access to. When those
> workloads grew up to be "real" workloads, they continued to be run on Windows and Linux, they weren't
> moved over to Unix platforms even if that would have been fairly easy in the Linux case. No, that
> was just unnecessary and pointless work. Just continue to deploy on the same platform.
>
> Exact same issue on the software side as with the hardware. Cross-development is pointless
> and stupid when the alternative is to just develop and deploy on the same platform. Yes,
> you can do it, but you generally would like to avoid it if at all possible.
>
> End result: cross-development is mainly done for platforms that are so weak as to make it
> pointless to develop on them. Nobody does native development in the embedded space. But whenever
> the target is powerful enough to support native development, there's a huge pressure to
> do it that way, because the cross-development model is so relatively painful.
>
> The corollary to the above is that yes, cross-development is also done when the target environment
> is too expensive to do native development on. That was the case for the big iron and traditional
> big Unix boxes. But that seriously erodes support for the expensive platform, and makes the cheap
> development platform much more able and likely to grow up into that space.
>
> It's why x86 won. Do you really think the world has changed radically?
>
Yes. Why? Because I have seen some of the orders.

On a related note, I agree with you on the past but I don't think it will play out the same this time for reasons far too complex to put into a post. Time will tell but I think the next 24 months will radically shift your views on this topic.

-Charlie