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I hope so, I'd love to see a more heterogeneous chip market, with x64, ARM, M1+, RISC-V all competing with each other. Maybe compilers would be default spit ou
by bloopernova 6y ago
I hope so, I'd love to see a more heterogeneous chip market, with x64, ARM, M1+, RISC-V all competing with each other.
Maybe compilers would be default spit out binaries that run on all of them, like Apple's Rosetta or whatever it's called.
- mbreese 6y ago> binaries that run on all of them Universal binaries. Apple calls those binaries “Universal binaries”. Rosetta is more like running different arch binaries through qemu. A brief look through Google says that there was a FatELF specification created years back, but never really went anywhere. Presumably because Linux users tend to know what arch they are using. Fat binaries would make distribution easier, but would double (or triple) the size of a binary. I doubt it would be worth the size trade off.
- sitkack 6y agoBinary size is a small percentage of the overall asset bundle. Docker also supports multiarch images. Given how easy it is to JIT or BT RISC ISAs, the future is good for binary portability.
- mbreese 6y agoI’m thinking of all of the small utilities and small command line programs that make up a stock Linux distro. Those don’t have many resources other than the binaries. Sure, the size of each is not much in absolute scale, but combined, you have a pretty significant increase if they were all fat binaries. That said, I don’t know what Apple does. For example, in the main download for Big Sur, is (for example) zsh a universal binary, or are there a specific x86/M1 downloads. I haven’t looked.