For example docker for arm has received a major push, with more images becoming available by default, more testing of dependencies, etc. Generally, a lot of developer tooling now get exercised on arm a lot more, making it more robust and accessible. And once you have that, it’s much easier to just build and deploy on arm as well.

Earlier there were a million paper cuts on ARM that couldn’t be solved by any single developer. So the friction to trying out ARM was high unless your use case already worked well. When millions of developers switched to M1 in the last year, most of these paper cuts were fixed. Almost everything just works now.

So the conversation went from “what’s the cost of getting our systems running on ARM and how does that compare to cloud pricing” to “our systems work everywhere, so who’s giving us the best deal”

Sure but the conjecture was that Apple was responsible for it, not open source developers

Ah, I thought Docker was already using an emulator on Windows and Mac. Or are you saying the cross compilation tooling is used more often now?

> Apple has moved to arm but does this really make it easier to write cloud apps for arm linux? What is Apple doing to make this easier?

They’re making ARM machines with really great perfs and used by a pretty large amounts of developers leading to:

* way more developers getting comfortable and natural access to ARM devices, meaning way easier for them to test & debug ARM issues

* way larger market for ARM developer tools

Even if Apple doesn't support writing code for Arm + Linux, you could use Go on a new Apple Silicon system and simply cross-compile for Linux for deployment.