OK, now with ARM Macs on the way — what’s the state of JDK on ARM? It seems that there are builds out there for Linux.

I’m not so knowledgeable on the subject, but ARM Macs are going to suffer for “normal” development in most regards, right? Because they’ll have to emulate stuff to be compatible?

I wouldn’t jump on it on day 1, for sure — the hope is that Homebrew and the like would start cross-compiling and produce “fat” binaries with both x86 and ARM support (Apple calls those “Universal” binaries).

It all depends on what kind of apps you use. Normal web development: I’d expect JVM and Node to produce Mac ARM binaries quite soon. iOS stuff, obviously there’s going to be support. It’s the long-tail of niche tools that are going to end up being emulated until devs or their CI starts supporting ARM.

Apple's track record for hardware type stuff is 'not brilliant', and making a performant ARM solution seems difficult (AWS fell on their face with Graviton AFAICT)

I do hope they manage it though because it would make Intel less complacent

They do have their whole iOS stuff on custom silicon so I think their track record is decent 🙂 — interesting about Graviton: I never thought about it but if ARM is gaining ground we’ll start seeing better compilers too. I’m clueless about the modern ISAs so no idea really 🙂

Ah yes, I forgot about iPhones, etc.! 😄 Maybe they will manage it in the more general case, it will be interesting to see

Would this also open up the possibility to compile GraalVM apps on macOS ARM and then run on Raspberry Pi? Or would these binaries look different, due to a different OS?

@borkdude probably different OS: different binary. Much as I would like to see Darwin on raspberry pis, I don’t think anyone is doing the necessary driver work…

Homebrew seems on it: https://twitter.com/mikemcquaid/status/1275381046448730114?s=21

Void Linux, and other distros, maintain a great many patches to make projects work on arm.

Hopefully this will ease their burden.

luckily being largely jvm based we don't have much to worry?

there are already battle tested ARM jvms i believe?

GraalVM native-image should also work for ARM. People already compiled babashka for ARM a couple of times

i had the chance to test out the M6g instances in preview and had no issues with either JVM or Graal builds

@goedelsoup Btw, you are the guy who made the clj-kondo PR for github/super-linter right? Thanks!

yup! i'm really looking forward to using it and it was our only blocker.

When I started with Macs, they were based on 68000 chips, then Apple switched to RISC, and then they switched to Intel. Each switchover was relatively painless, considering how fundamental each shift was.