Comment by Twirrim
1 year ago
> But then there is the software ecosystem issue.
We still have problems with software not being optimised for Arm these days, which is just astounding given the prevalence on mobile devices, let alone the market share represented by Apple. Even Golang is still lacking a whole bunch of optimisations that are present in x86, and Google has their own Arm based chips.
Compilers pull off miracles, but a lot of optimisations are going to take direct experience and dedicated work.
Considering how often ARM processors are used to run an application on top of a framework over an interpreted language inside a VM, all to display what amounts to kilobytes of text and megabytes of images, using hundreds of megabytes of RAM and billions of operations per second, I'm surprised anyone even bothers optimizing anything, anymore.
For all it's success it's still kind of a niche-language (and even with the amount of Google compiler developers, they're are spread thin between V8, Go, Dart,etc).
I think the keys to Risc-V in terms of software will be,
LLVM (gives us C, C++, Rust, Zig,etc), this is probably already happening?
JavaScript (V8 support for Android should be the biggest driver, also enabling Node,Deno,etc but it's speed will depend on Google interest)
JVM (Does Oracle have interest at all? Could be a major roadblock unless Google funds it, again depends on Android interest).
So Android on Risc-V could really be a game-changer but Google just backed down a bit recently.
Dotnet(games) and Ruby (and even Python?) would probably be like Go with custom runtimes/JIT's needing custom work but no obvious clear marketshare/funding.
It'll remain a niche but I do really think Android devices (or something else equally popular, a chinese home-PC?) would be the gamechanger to push demand over the top.
> Even Golang
Golang's compiler is weak compared to the competition. It's probably not a good demonstration of most ISAs really.