Sure, but why does the developer environment have to be the same architecture as in production? Think of it as ahead-of-time binary translation if you want to.

Sure, but why does the developer environment have to be the same architecture as in production? Think of it as ahead-of-time binary translation if you want to. These days, even fairly low-level system software is surprisingly portable. Entire GNU/Linux distributions are developed this way, for the majority of architectures they support.