Re:On Apple Announcing the ARM Mac Transition at WWDC This M...
by p_l on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @06:43PM
(#23471783)
LLVM bitcode is not that portable in reality. Just like Plan9 assembly intermediary bitcode files are pretty much single architecture, due to containing lots and lots of low-level assumptions about the target architecture, not to mention possible incompatibilities in extended intrinsics (for example for vector units).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:On Apple Announcing the ARM Mac Transition at WWDC This M...
by Scaevolus on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @07:27PM
(#23472132)
Most of the portability problems for retargetting to another little endian 64-bit architecture aren't the easy ones of bit widths and integer types, but rather more subtle things like a more relaxed memory model and different performance characteristics.
It's not worth the overhead of attempting to ship bitcode. Apple has shipped products on 6502, 68000, PPC, x86, x86-64, ARM, and ARM64. The transitions have been annoying for the lost software, but that's not an unusual occurrence for an OSX upgrade either.
Re:On Apple Announcing the ARM Mac Transition at WWDC This M...
by philistine on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @07:33PM
(#23472173)
What was the Newton using ?
Re:On Apple Announcing the ARM Mac Transition at WWDC This M...
by portlander52232 on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @07:52PM
(#23472318)
They were also ARM.