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*It disregards the importance of ports. Even if an architecture isn't widely used, supporting multiple architectures can help reveal bugs in the original implem
by foota 11mo ago
*It disregards the importance of ports. Even if an architecture isn't widely used, supporting multiple architectures can help reveal bugs in the original implementation that wouldn't otherwise be obvious."
Imo this is true for going from one to a handful, but less true when going from a handful to more. Afaict there are 6 official ports and 12 unofficial ports (from https://www.debian.org/ports/ https://www.debian.org/ports/).
- wtallis 11mo agoIt really comes down to which architectures you're porting to. The two biggest issues are big endian vs little endian, and memory consistency models. Little endian is the clear winner for actively-developed architectures, but there are still plenty of vintage big endian architectures to target, and it looks like IBM mainframes at least are still exclusively big endian. For memory consistency, Alpha historically had value as the weakest and most likely to expose bugs. But nobody really wants to implement hardware like that anymore, almost everything falls somewhere on the spectrum of behavior bounded by x86 (strict) and Arm (weaker), and newer languages (eg. C++ 11) mean newer code can be explicit about its expectations rather than ambiguous or implicit.