Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on February 25, 2019 11:32 pm wrote:
> So mostly fixable as soon as someone cares? The tools are tough (can’t make an opinion without details,
> and some people have idiosyncratic tool use and will never be satisfied by alternatives) but performance
> and ergonomics are presumably chugging along just fine; and will get a huge boost when Apple launches.

On Windows Visual Studio is not available on ARM64, that's a biggie. If you want to do any kind of development it's cross-compilation and remote debugging. clang-cl is usable as a cross-compiler but it still has a lot of rough edges and I've not seen it hosted directly on ARM64. On Linux specialist tools (such as rr) simply don't work.

> And yes, there will be the raw Linux kernel hackers who will not beh happy (but presumably such people
> are hardly happy using a Mac today...) Meanwhile for people who operate at a higher level, either in
> VMs/interpreted (PHP, JVM, Perl, Python, JS, ...) or generic C/C++ life is theoretically fine.
>
> The big issue, then, is are they, eg, willing to change from perhaps using Dev Studio in Windows
> on Mac to using XCode? In the absence of data, I don’t think we can conclude anything (beyond
> that a lot of people will feel compelled to say “never, over my dead body” and then extrapolate
> aggressively, but with zero data, to the rest of the population).
> Beyond which I could certainly imagine an MS-Apple deal that brings Dev
> Studio ARM to the ARM Mac (probably a win-win for both parties)...

The question you have to ask yourself is why would anybody pick an ARM64 machine over an x86 machine for development? At the moment the platform has no advantage and a lot of disadvantages.