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Re:Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space by WorldMaker on Friday February 22, 2019 @12:34PM (#19227195)
> There was a time when being on the same platform as the deployment environment was super important

Which is also interesting because there was a time before that where being on the same platform as the deployment environment was sometimes considered nigh impossible, such as the early days of the "microcomputer" revolution where a lot of software was written on big iron mainframes to run on much more constrained devices (C64, Apple II, etc). It's interesting to compare the IDEs and architectures of that era and how much cross-compilation has always happened. There doesn't seem to be a lot of computing history where the machine used to build the software was the same machine intended to run the software, it's the modern PC era that seems the unique inflection point where so much of our software are built and run on the same architectures.

(A lot of the modern tools such as VMs like the JVM and CLR are because of the dreams and imaginations of those developers that directly experienced those earlier eras.)

It's interesting how that tide shifts from time to time, and we so easily forget what that was like, forget to notice the high water marks of previous generations. (Even as we take advantage of it in other ways, we cross-compile to mobile and IoT devices today we'd have no way to run IDEs on, and would rather not try to run compilers directly on them.)

Re:Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space by rbanffy on Friday February 22, 2019 @03:21PM (#19228771)
I know some software was written on minis to run on 8-bit computers, but I have a hard time imagining that as the norm. My Apple II dev rig was two computers, one running development tools and one to test and they were two because running my software wasn't possible on the development machine without rebooting and loading all the tools took 30 seconds - a painful eternity in Apple II terms.
Re:Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space by pjmlp on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:52PM (#19229453)
It was quite common in the game industry.

As confirmed by multiple interviews on the RetroGaming Magazine, almost every indie that managed to get enough pounds to carry on with their dream, invested into such setup when they started going big.

Re:Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space by rbanffy on Monday February 25, 2019 @05:52AM (#19244649)
For consoles, it's natural - they don't have any self-hosted development tools and the machine you write your code with is largely irrelevant. Early adopters also benefit from the maturity of the tools in other platforms for the time before native tools are developed.

This may be more common in game studios, but was not mainstream in other segments.

Re:Linus Torvalds on Why ARM Won't Win the Server Space by pjmlp on Monday February 25, 2019 @01:52PM (#19248252)
It was quite common on C64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum.

Games were developed on bigger systems, and uploaded into them via the expansion ports.