https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqUtGk0DHbQ
And that's a genuine $9, as in you can buy 10 or 1000 if you want, unlike the "$5" Pi Zero which was one per order, plus shipping. (It has a genuine, higher, price recently, and the Pi Zero 2 is a great deal if you want a low end Arm board).
And yes, the Oasis looks very promising, hopefully this year.
Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?
I really like it that the x86 monoculture is being disrupted, and enjoy the benefits of low-wattage high-performance systems, but we still have a long way to go.
It doesn't help so much if your Mac is still Intel based, admittedly.
Though even in .NET you can still get bitten by assumptions about endianness, for example.
Newer languages are even easier. Rust and Go almost always port with zero issues. Obviously the same goes for scripting and VM based languages like Java.
The architecture matters less than it used to.
I was speaking to whether the code will work. The answer is almost always yes. Optimizations at a higher level such as algorithm choice or where allocations are performed also are architecture neutral. This is most optimization.
Apple has actually put a lot of effort to make the x86 to ARM transition as smooth as possible regarding memory consistency model, this is a strong indication that it's not as trivial as you seem to think.
RISC-V has a standardised (optional) TSO memory model mode, plus "fence.tso" instruction that works in normal mode, even on CPUs that predate it (it defaults to the stronger "fence rw,rw" in that case). Well, assuming the CPU core designer read the spec carefully and doesn't trap on unknown "fence" instructions (looking at you, THead...)
The whole architecture is niche since then.
Linus Torvalds has a very interesting POV why x86 won. "Develop at home" issues. You are going to deploy to a system that is similar to what you built on. If you run x86 then you'll deploy to x86. And he points to that as the reason for x86 servers.
Home is today a x86 or arm computer (arm if you like Apple), perhaps some SBCs (usually arm, perhaps some mips), and some IOT (often esps, so xtensa / risc-v) plus some router/wifi device (arm).
RISC-V is scaling up on that axis. It is killing other ecosystems for embedded/iot. It's becoming useful for SBCs and low end desktop boards are on the horizon.
That's the scaling path that works. You are $20 away from trying it out. And it can scale all the way to an affordable desktop soon (Milk-V).
It's IMHO not "a lot of energy on RISC-V", it's a quickly growing user base. OpenPOWER lost that.