There are so many different flavors of AMD64 that it’s not even a single target from my perspective. Check out the quantity of compiler flags and ifdef statemen

There are so many different flavors of AMD64 that it’s not even a single target from my perspective. Check out the quantity of compiler flags and ifdef statements you see in just about everything. I’ve seen binaries in production run at 30% of the speed seen DEV/QA. These would also segfault every few hours. But debug builds ran fine in production. Root cause in that case was the Intel server had some hardware instructions available that the Intel developer and QA systems didn’t. The runtime chose to use these fancy new instructions, which turned out to be a buggy and slow code path. Again, if you’re not doing DEV/QA on hardware (and OS, dependency, and firmware versions) that differ from production you will eventually be bitten. Everything is so complex and there are so many layers involved it is impossible to have confidence. Containers make this worse in my opinion by adding another complex (and buggy) abstraction layer.