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A comment on Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license. Parent comment

Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by hajile on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @10:44PM (#41921253)
ARM already did the hard work. Once you've ported your app to ARM, you've no doubt made sure all the ISA-specific bits are isolated while the rest is generic and portable. This means you already know where to go and what to change and hopefully already have testing in place to make sure your changes work correctly.

Aside from the philosophy, lots of practical work has been done and is ongoing. On the systems level, there has already been massive ongoing work. Alibaba for example ported the entirety of Android to RISC-V then handed it off to Google. Lots of other big companies have tons of coders working on porting all kinds of libraries to RISC-V and progress has been quite rapid.

And of course, it is worth pointing out that an overwhelming majority of day-to-day software is written in managed languages on runtimes that have already been ported to RISC-V.

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by NavinF on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @10:53PM (#41921297)
Interesting, does anyone know what percentage of top Android apps run on RISC-V? I'd expect a lot of apps like games to only have binaries for ARM
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by KRAKRISMOTT on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @11:53PM (#41921643)
The thing about RISC-V is that they indirectly have the R&D coffers of the Chinese government backing them for strategic reasons. They are the hardware equivalent of Uber's scale-first-make-money later strategy. This is not a competition that ARM can win purely relying on their existing market dominance.
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by Pet_Ant on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @10:57PM (#41921318)
Aren’t Android binaries in Dalvik so you only need to port that to get it to run on RISC-V?
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by canucker2016 on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @11:36PM (#41921549)
Many games, multimedia apps (native FFMPEG libs), and other apps that require native C/C++ libs would require a recompile/translation for RISC-V.
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by shash on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @05:00AM (#41923188)
FFMPEG has a RISC-V port. We're yet to try it, but I did successfully compile it to target RISC-V vector extensions.
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by ThatPlayer on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @05:45AM (#41923431)
Not Android, but Box86 already works on RISC-V, even already running games on top of Wine and DXVK: https://youtu.be/qHLKB39xVkw

It redirects calls to x86 libraries to native RISC-V versions of the library.

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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by anthk on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @05:12PM (#41929306)
Most FLOSS libraries are already ported over thanks to GNU/Linux.
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by NavinF on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @11:07PM (#41921373)
https://developer.android.com/ndk
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by snvzz on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @11:18PM (#41921443)
Aren't most applications NOT using the ndk?
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by monocasa on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @11:32PM (#41921527)
NDK usage is pretty high among applications that actually matter.
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by saagarjha on Tuesday October 22, 2024 @11:59PM (#41921680)
Most major apps use the NDK.
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Re:Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license by pjmlp on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @03:41AM (#41922752)
Everyone that doesn't want to write Java/Kotlin is using the NDK.

Although from Google's point of view the NDK only purpose is for enabling writing native methods, reuse of C and C++ libraries, games and real time audio, from point of view of others, it is how they sneak Cordova, React Native, Flutter, Xamarin,.... into Android.

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