Oranges and, eh, pears.

Sun never had the volume Apple does. SPARC was far from competitive with x86 in its later days, unlike Apple's A-series chips.

Transmeta? I was there from ~2001 until we closed the doors. What some people still don't understand was that Transmeta's failure was a business failure, not a technical one. When Crusoe launched it had greater power efficiency than Intel's chips. Intel has _officially_ credited Transmeta with kickstarting Intel's focus on power. Execution and business failure cost Transmeta to slip more than a year at which point opportunity and customer goodwill had sailed. Someone really should write a book about all the drama.

Maybe that person is you?

What do you think about wasm?

No I'm not a writer and I don't have nearly the insights needed. I'd read it though.

I have been around compiler internal formats and "bytecode" representations since the mid 80es. WASM is simply brilliant for what is designed for. I'm particularly in love with the structured control flow (key for enabling 1-pass translation). I used a block structure IR a compiler IR in the mid-90es. (EDIT: am I being trolled?)

Trolled, no. :)

I think wasm will be the portable bytecode we have all been promised. It will literally run our flying cars.

It also melts away the need for an MMU and because of that, the operating system. Requiring an OS, kernel/user code is no longer referentialy transparent, but with wasm, you can basically have an infinite number of hypervisors.

I'm carefully optimistic that WASM could point a path out of our legacy. It has a lot of potential and opens up new possibilities, so please use it and contribute improvements :)

Apple has built an ecosystem of automatic app re-compiling for new architecture. Every AppStore app that is built using modern (last 5 years) tools and xcode, in theory, should be transparently re-compilable to a different uarch. Apple currently does this with watchos apps.

So, yes, they learned. I suspect they will ship an x86 emulator as they did with Rosetta, additionally.

for between arm variants that is true, but bitcode is still tied to the target architcure [1], so transparent re-compiling x64 bitcode into arm64 is unlikely unless apple has done some changes to how bitcode works that im unaware of

[1] https://www.infoq.com/articles/ios-9-bitcode/