[georgemcbay]

powerful is pretty relative, there are lots of tasks where even a modern "low-end" Intel chip will spank any ARM device. Also "open" is misleading to downright wrong here too. ARM will license their designs to virtually anyone, but that doesn't mean they are open by most commonly accepted definitions of the word as it relates to technology. ARM is, after all, an IP company.

Having said all of that, almost all of my hobbyist non-day-job programming involves writing Go for ARM devices and I love the platform, but it isn't always a clear winner.

As far as "not everything running on ARM", the compiler situation is pretty good, where things tend to fall short in on kernel support for specific ARM SoCs. Until fairly recently most ARM SoC manufactuers had their own kernel forks with pushes back to the mainline few and far between. This has been changing a lot post Linux-3.7 due to Linus laying down the law on them a bit, but kernel compatibility and hardware drivers (this is why most alternate phone OSes based on Linux are going to route of being compatible with Android device drivers over standard Linux device drivers) are generally still the biggest stumbling blocks.

[yuhong]

"open" I think referring to in relation to x86.