| > I have been coding since the mid-80's, not having the same local UNIX machine for doing development than what the server was running was quite common in the world of commercial UNIXes. Things change. Why is x86 the primary server platform? It isn't a great micro architecture. The fact that ARM and others (Like power pc) have been eating their lunch in terms of price, performance, and power consumption is proof enough of that. So how do you explain the rise of x86 and the fall of pretty much every other platform on servers? To me, it's simple. x86 got fast enough on consumer hardware to be able to run the same software that would run on servers. Developers like to test their software locally. Emulators for anything to x86 have been terribly slow. That's why since about the late 90's pretty much everyone has been running x86 servers. That you can cross compile isn't really the issue. Even running managed languages isn't the issue. The issue is that there are always differences that are hard to compare when switching platforms if the one you are developing on isn't the same as the one you are targeting. That's like 90% the reason why most consoles have switched over to x86. Mobile devices would have gone to x86 were it not for the fact that licensing costs were too high and the performance/watt ratio too low. |
> Why is x86 the primary server platform?
Cheap PC prices plus Linux meant you could deploy Linux for a fraction of what deploying any other Unix (save the *BSD family which shares similar advantages).
Cheap ARM CPUs and reasonably priced, performant ARM development machines pretty much harpoons that big advantage x86 had.
> The issue is that there are always differences that are hard to compare when switching platforms if the one you are developing on isn't the same as the one you are targeting.
Yes and no. We've been developing on MacOS and deploying to Linux for some time. The issues we end up fighting are minimal and we're going from one OS to another. I suspect most of the ARM-x86 issues that haven't already cropped up and been dealt with will be soon.