Apple is officially moving away from Intel to a custom Arm chip

[Paolo Invernizzi]

On Wednesday, 1 July 2020 at 03:10:41 UTC, Seiji Emery wrote:
> addendum:
>
> yes, this means you'd be stuck w/ an apple dev kit (and need to 
> be a registered apple developer so the full cost of getting 
> this is ~$600)
>
> but this is probably your best bet, by far, for getting a full, 
> working developer environment on an arm chipset atm, outside of 
> running an old surface tablet w/ windows RT, or running a linux 
> distro off a phone, or something.

Nvidia is selling pretty popular solutions based on ARM and 
Nvidia GPU, all linux powered.
You really don't need to rely on a Phone or (ugh) old surface 
tablets ...

> it'd be pretty interesting to see if dmd can run on this out of 
> the box, and what problems (if any) there might be with that. 
> (intrinsics? threading? runtime code modification??)
> For porting bits of dmd and/or druntime and/or toolchain stuff 
> to arm, I'm not sure you could do better than working on a 
> pretty powerful arm chip that can run both arm *and* x86_64 code

Again, LDC runs out of the box on ARM since a long time now ... 
just check on the release page for the available tarred 
distributions
> You'd be stuck w/ macos ofc, but I'm pretty sure you could do 
> quite a bit worse on that front in terms of having a real, 
> working desktop development environment, that can run real dev 
> tools and w/ performance that will probably not suck. no visual 
> studio, but eh, vscode should work (hopefully), and there's 
> intellij stuff. and there's xcode, which... if nothing else has 
> pretty good debugging and profiling tools, and can be run on d 
> binaries if you're sufficiently motivated and/or desperate

A 35$ Raspberry PI supports 2x 4K display, and comes with a 
Debian based linux complete with GUI. You can attach a keyboard, 
mouse and have a little ARM machine to toy with (but no 
precompiled LDC, its 32bit ...)

There are plenty of solutions, without having to rely on Apple!

(Disclaimer, message written on my 2019 iMac, eheh)

/P