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

[Seb]

On Wednesday, 24 June 2020 at 14:54:16 UTC, aberba wrote:
> On Wednesday, 24 June 2020 at 12:56:26 UTC, Steven 
> Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On 6/24/20 7:21 AM, aberba wrote:
>>> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/apples-new-macs-how-theyll-work-after-ditching-intel-chips-11592862690
>>> 
>>> 
>>> This means there's genuine interest in Arm. Note there's 
>>> similar move by Microsoft to get their system to work on Arm 
>>> chips.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> PC was the only compelling target for Intel/Amd targets but 
>>> now its changing.
>>
>> I was wondering about this. DMD I think only supports Intel, 
>> right? Are there any plans to support ARM, or will ldc/gdc be 
>> the only compilers that support Mac in the future?

There are _zero_ plans to make DMD work on ARM architectures. 
There are so many other actually impactful things to do ;-)

> They're saying the transition will take two yrs. Seems they're 
> really serious about the move to Arm. Two yrs to get DMD to 
> work on Arm.

To clarify and avoid confusion I see absolutely no reason anyone 
would waste this huge effort of time into getting DMD to work on 
ARM as there are two superior and working compiler backends and 
thus this won't be happening.

So yes you'll have to move away from DMD to LDC or GDC, but that 
shouldn't be a concern to anyone as even today with the amazing 
LDC team there's absolutely no reason to use DMD either. In fact 
I personally believe using DMD for production is irresponsible 
and at the very least should be strongly discouraged as mwe can't 
seem to convince the DFL/Walter to drop the DMD backend for 
obvious reasons.

Tl;Dr: it's just yet another nail in the coffin against DMD ...