[Marsymars]

> I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips.

Depends why the Snapdragon chips were relevant in the first place! I got an ARM laptop for work so that I can locally build things for ARM that we want to be able to deploy to ARM servers.

[wryun]

Surprising. Cross compilation too annoying to set up? No CI pipelines for things you're actually deploying?

(I'm keen about ARM and RISC-V systems, but I can never actually justify them given the spotty Linux situation and no actual use case)

[mort96]

Cross compilation is a pain to set up, especially if you're relying on system libraries for anything. Even dynamically linking against glibc is a pain when cross compiling.

[aallaall]

Linux on arm is probably the most popular computing device platform in the world.

[wryun]

Which doesn't mean that it's easy to use an ARM device in the way I'd want to (i.e. as a trouble-free laptop or desktop with complete upstream kernel support).

[Marsymars]

We do have ARM CI pipelines now, but I can only imagine what a nightmare they would have been to set up without any ability to locally debug bits that were broken for architectural reasons.

[wryun]

I guess you must be doing trickier things than I ever have. I've found docker's emulation via qemu pretty reliable, and I'd be pretty surprised if there was a corner case that wouldn't show on it but would show on a native system.

[Marsymars]

Not really trickier, but different stack - we’re a .NET stack with a pile of linters, analyzers, tests, etc. No emulation, everything run natively on both x86-64 and ARM64. (But prior to actually running/debugging it on arm64, had various hang-ups.)

Native is also much faster than qemu emulation - I have a personal (non-.NET) project where I moved the CI from docker/qemu for x86+arm builds to separate x86+arm runners, and it cut the runtime from 10 minutes in total to 2 minutes per runner.

[fweimer]

It's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries.

Outside the embedded space, cross-compilation really is a fool's errand: either your software is not portable (which means it's not future-proof), or you are targeting an architecture that is not commercially viable.

[Marsymars]

> It's more surprising to me that software isn't portable enough that you can develop locally on x86-64. And then have a proper pipeline that produces the official binaries.

This is what we largely do - my entire team other than me is on x86, but setting up the ARM pipelines (on GitHub Actions runners) would have been a real pain without being able to debug issues locally.