And he's wrong. In the enterprise, the vast majority of devs are on Windows, for Java for example. That doesn't mean that their deployment target is Windows, most of the time it's Linux. And the development differences, chance of bugs, performance profiles are way different between OSes than they are between CPU architectures.
I can install a reasonably performing x86 Linux VM on an x86 Windows host. If the same can be said for an ARM VM on an x86 host, please share how, I'd love to learn that trick.
> Most of those enterprise devs don't even get to touch the test/staging/prod environment, yet they still do their jobs.
They can usually run at least some part of the stack locally. Maybe not the full thing, at least part of it.
> Regarding the VM, today I guess it would be a bit ugly through Qemu but tooling is always solved if there's a need.
Tooling doesn't magically fix perf. Have you actually tried that specific setup? Searching online I get results like https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/12144 which aren't impressive, and I don't count as "reasonably performing".
Those results also jive with my experience - the meager demands of mobile apps are outrageously slow inside an ARM emulator running on x86 every time I've tried it, although I'll admit I haven't tried it on Qemu specifically. I can only imagine the horror of trying to run a full ARM server stack on x86 via emulator - perf is bad enough when it's native. For mobile, the first thing I do is fix the x86 builds (so I can use an x86 device emulator), buy a real ARM device out of my own pocket, and/or educate and/or fire my employer for their outrageously wasteful use of my time if they're serious about me and my coworkers using mobile ARM emulators on x86 for any serious length of time (that kind of waste of expensive resources like developer time can't possibly be a sustainable business decision.)
You're comparing a bytecode virtual machine to a processor microarchitecture. He's talking about why a particular hardware platform becomes dominant. You could say the same thing about any interpreted language, not just Java. How about python or javascript? Java didn't displace x86.
> That doesn't mean that their deployment target is Windows, most of the time it's Linux.
I don't feel like that's true. I don't have data to say otherwise, but my impression for the majority of non-tech businesses I encounter is that they are very much still Windows shops, and still on-prem.
I've worked for a few, consulted for others, have friends working for yet others. It's a mix. Java shops go Win/Lin, .NET generally is Win/Win, for now.
He isn't wrong since most linux servers run on x86 architecture and obviously most windows desktops run on x86 architecture.
To your last point, if that is true, then what will the differences be when both the OS and CPU architectures are different? I suspect it will create even more headaches.
I don't see ARM winning the server space anytime soon or ever considering how established and dominant x86 is.
