Yes, I started with QEMU user emulation. It was so lame (lots of bugs in QEMU; both related to unsupported instructions and other miscellany that affected Go) t

Yes, I started with QEMU user emulation. It was so lame (lots of bugs in QEMU; both related to unsupported instructions and other miscellany that affected Go) that I just wrote my own arm64 emulator eventually (didn't take long, it's a variant of Plan 9's [5kqv]i user space emulators, I forgot to mention that all this work started on Plan 9). Now I have hardware but my emulator still gets its use, it's a great debugger too.